PHOTO POST
It might be daybreak or it might be day’s end, when sunshine suddenly streaks across the autumn landscape.
Even on a cloudless afternoon, a low-angled sun heats up the remaining flowers for just a few hours.
But rain or shine, on the wide expanse of mudflat in the marsh clusters of dabbling ducks are feeding. The smallest of the lot, the Green-Winged Teal, came within camera range late one afternoon, minutes before sunset.
Green flash on mudflat
Slurping primordial soup
A lone White-Throated Sparrow preferred the mid-morning hours for forays beyond the thickets and onto the mudflat.
White-Throated Sparrow on mudflat
At the marsh edge a forest of inky cap mushrooms sprang up, spreading their rich stain on anyone who reached out to touch, before withering back to earth a day later.
Inky Caps at marsh edge
On the marsh edge, too, I found another treasure: a cracked, fragile, translucent clam shell. When washed by ripples at the lakeshore the shell channeled many colours of sunlight.
Standing shell
When a wavelet toppled the shell into sandy water it appeared a whole new creature, ready to swim away.
Swimming shell
For a few days in the last week of October, the bright air warmed enough in early afternoon to activate bees and hover flies.
Green Metallic Sweat Bee on Rudbeckia
Hoverfly on Calendula
Back in the marsh a Mute Swan found a patch of water deep enough to float in.
Stretch, swan
A small flock of wading birds – I believe these are Pectoral Sandpipers – preferred to feed in very shallow water at the far edge of the mudflat.
Pectoral Sandpipers
Like many other pipers who stopped here this fall, they seem now to have departed for points south.
Pointing this way
The gulls, though, will stick around for the winter, sometimes all together on the marsh, sometimes in congregations on the waters of the lake, sometimes strolling quietly in early morning along the shoreline.
Three gulls before sunrise
At last, suddenly, the bright light rises out of the lake.
Sunrise at Port Darlington breakwater, Lake Ontario