Given that one of my favorite reads on Kos is the Backyard Science Group’s “Daily Bucket” I thought an inaugural diary would be to photo-essay a walk along a stretch of the Schuylkill River on the last day of January.
This is an area I take frequent walks to since it is fairly close to where I live, there are a number of nice trails along the river or simply using the nearby Ben Franklin Parkway and local streets of Philadelphia in order to see different things; flowers, birds, architecture, or possibly just people-watching.
The Schuylkill River is a major tributary of the Delaware River. It rises in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania and flows through Philadelphia before joining with the Delaware River to the northeast of the Philadelphia airport. It has a varied and storied history, including issues with pollution, silt from coal mining operations, and even catching fire once. There has been considerable clean up activity and the river is now quite scenic and the Schuylkill River Trail along the river in the city is quite popular for walking and bicycling.
Just below the hill on which the Philadelphia Museum of Art sits is the Fairmount Waterworks and a dam on the Schuylkill River. This is also the southern end of Fairmount Park, which extends a distance up the river and also encompasses the Philadelphia Zoo and some other attractions. The dam was constructed in 1928 to replace an older dam that channeled water to the waterworks. It also acted as a block on the tidal effect of the Schuylkill and prevented any chance of brackish water getting to the intakes.
On this day I was heading to the far side of the dam in particular in order to see how the birds normally residing in numbers here had handled the 8” of snow that had fallen the previous weekend. So I crossed the river on a bridge near the Art Museum and headed up the west bank of the river. There was a light wind and temperatures were in the low 40s (F).
Below the dam are a number of rocks that only appear when the tide is out. When the rocks are above water there is usually gulls, ducks, and possibly cormorants to be found sitting there.
About this time a pair of ducks came in and landed in the river right below where I was standing.
There were also a few Canada Geese grazing along the bank. It appears most of the geese that winter over here were further upstream since I saw a few large flocks up that way a few days later.
Still no cormorants. My best guess is that when the river was more heavily iced over earlier in the week they moved down to the Delaware River to hang out where there was more open water.
However, I do have photos of one from an earlier visit to this area.
Other birds to be seen in the general area include the usual sparrows, starlings, robins, and blackbirds. However, there are also turkey vultures, mockingbirds, red-tail hawks (who often nest on a building of the nearby Franklin Institute), and peregrine falcons (who nest on City Hall.)
(All photos are taken with either a Nikon D3200 or an Iphone 5. Most of the above shots were the Nikon using a DX 55-300 lens which I bought pretty much for wildlife/bird pictures. Photos have been cropped and shrunk in an editor in order to use less space.)