Once the Fourth of July weekend had gone, so too any excitement to speak of. Oppressive heat has set in and people are vacationing elsewhere, at a lake or staying in air conditioned environments. The two air conditioners in our camper have been running 24/7 and yet the temperature inside rises uncomfortably in the afternoon.
We have a trickle of campers, enough that we are in a routine of daily bath house cleaning early in the morning before it gets too hot to breath. Mornings is when we do campsite maintenance too. With the rain we have been getting, the grass and other vegetation is growing vigorously, requiring mowing and trimming at least once a week. It's taking about five hours just to get our campground mowed and then another four hours on the gas powered trimmer. All of this being done after five pm, working until it gets dark a couple of times a week. Still, I would sweat pounds of water and it would take conscious effort to drink enough to not become dehydrated.
What the heck are we doing here? When we started full-timing the plan was to be in cool places in the summer and warm places in the winter. Our first two summers worked out great, we were at just over 8,000 feet of elevation and didn't need the air conditioners once. But here we are in Hotlanta sweltering, what gives?
Oh yeah, the grandbaby! That's why we are here.
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| Can't think of a better reason to spend the summer in Atlanta. |
Any excuse to post a baby picture.
Another thing I expected by being in the woods alongside a significant river in the summer is critters. While there have been quite a few of the four-footed kind, there has been a complete dearth of the legless varieties. I really expected that snakes were going to be common and seen frequently. But as I am writing this post well after the snakes have holed up for the winter, I can say that I saw only a single, solitary snake the whole summer.
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| This three foot rat snake was the one and only snake I saw all summer. |
In our list of duties as Camp Hosts, cleaning campsites after campers leave has been common to all of our camp host positions through the years. Most of the time campers leave their sites in good shape but then there are those few that make up for all the rest, using their fire pit as if it were a landfill, burning trash, wads of aluminum foil, aluminum cans, melon rinds, dozens of cigarette butts and sometimes really gross stuff that you turn your head away from while scooping it with a shovel. Sometimes campers come in with ambitious plans for campfires, hauling enough wood with them to run a wood stove for a month in a Minnesota winter. For whatever reason (mostly because it is so friggin' hot!), they don't consume as much wood as they thought they would and find it too much trouble to load it back up and take it home with them. We collect this wood and stockpile it at the camp host site. A lot of it is given to other campers that come in too late to buy wood at the visitor center. But we always have a pretty good stack of wood and it is an attractive habitat for a variety of critters.
Fence lizards have taken up residence in the wood pile. These guys are a hoot to watch, they get on top of a piece of wood and start doing "push-ups", pumping their front legs and bobbing their heads up a down at each other. But then they spot a tasty morsel and will dart to their target and gulp it down faster than the eye can follow.
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| Juvenile fence lizard. Adults are about 3X larger. |
While the lizards are residents of our campsite we also have some routine visitors. Six crows have developed the habit of a sunrise and sunset visit. It might have something to do with a handful of raw peanuts that I put out every day at that time. These same six crows seem to have staked out the entire campground section of the park as their territory. They cycle through the same places at roughly the same time of day every day. We have taken to calling them the CG6 (camp ground 6). Each of them have a personality but the one we call Ringo (during the molt he developed a distinct ring around his neck) seems to be the "advance man" of the bunch. He is the first to arrive at our campsite and he will perch on the same one or two branches out of the hundreds available. From his perch he will scout the campsite to see if peanuts have been put out. If they have then he has a call he uses to tell the rest of the gang that breakfast or dinner is served. If I have not put the peanuts out yet then he has another, far more raucous, call that he uses to tell me to get with it.
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| Ringo calling his buddies in for their afternoon peanut ration. |
As the summer went on, Cyndee first improvised a bird bath from a clay pot tray to put out below the bird feeders we have, and later she acquired a colored glass bowl that sat atop a short metal rod. The goldfinches and wrens have been taking full advantage, jumping in and dipping their whole body followed by vigorous shaking. The crows are too big to use it for a bath but they have been getting their share of drinks out of it.
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| This male goldfinch was a frequent visitor that stayed late into the fall. |
Always present are the hummingbirds. It is not unusual to have twenty at a time maneuvering for a place at one of the eight feeding stations we have. I've posted a number of pictures of hummingbirds at the feeders but after a lot of stalking and judicious use of a zoom lens and cropping and enlarging I got a so-so shot of a female ruby throated in its natural environment.
Another regular to our campsite, and fun to watch hunt, is the brown thrasher. Watching these guys stalking through the forest floor tossing twigs and leaves as they go you can see their ancient ancestor dinosaur coming out.
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| This brown thrasher scored a peanut that the crows missed. |
I mentioned earlier in this post that we had been getting rain. It really has been a lot of rain, days and days at a time. While the moisture is welcome we haven't had the normal corresponding cooling that a rain brings. It's been more like a hot shower than a refreshing rain. This combination of wet, hot and solid cloud cover must have been a signal to fungus of all kinds. We have had mushrooms of so many sizes, colors and shapes we couldn't count them all. The black ones have been the most spectacular. They are about the size of a grapefruit and hug the ground tightly and are a dull, dark black. When you hit them with the mower they explode into a huge black cloud of spores. I only had to hit one to learn to dodge the rest.
But other mushrooms were showy in their look and not so overt in the spreading of their spores. One caught my attention because it looked more like something you would see while diving a coral reef.
And another I found in the darkest part of the woods. It was not hard to find because it was gigantic. The photo has nothing in it to show scale but the hood on the one below was about the size of a dinner plate.
The summer has been wearing on but it won't be long before Labor Day comes around. It is going to be interesting as our co-host will be departing in mid-September and the park has no replacement in the wings. We are not exactly looking forward to the prospect of picking up the care for another 30 campsites and two more bath houses. Especially for a major holiday.
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