Sunday was the first day since Spring cool enough to bike ride the local trail. Even still, the humidity was very high and the temperature in the eighties. This is South Florida, you know.
After a filling of tires and a fiddling with brakes, we slowly and hesitantly began our ride. The first ride of the season goes often awry (at least, it does with our little gang of riders), but we muddled along.
This ride was unlike previous ones because I brought along my camera. This, you may not realize, was a bit of a dance with danger. There is always the chance I may wipe out; I am, after all, a person whose missteps periodically prostrate me into humbleness. On Sunday, however, the desire to photograph Nature's loveliness won out over my usual solicitousness. I'm glad it did because we saw several lovely things on the trail.
Our county provides water stations along the trail and at one of those was a clearing where I spotted this decaying stump with fungi. I can't help myself; I am becoming fascinated by molds and fungi. I must get a good fungi guide soon because I am tired of being unable to identify all the mushrooms and such I come across. This stump was as tall as I, but covered in fungi. I would have gotten a closer look, but the ground was covered in plants and it would be just my luck to unknowingly step in poison ivy. I've never done that and am not interested in trying it.
In the same clearing, we found hundreds of bunches of purple berries.
At home, I was able to identify them as American Beautyberry - Callicarpa Americana. Beautiful, but has the same irritating scent of its cousin, Shrub Verbena, also known as Lantana.
Callicarpa is Greek for "beautiful fruit," however they are not tasty berries. They are an emergency food source for birds and deer, saved for consumption in the coldest times when nothing else can be found. This is because the berries are very tart. Callicarpa is apparently effective in repelling mosquitoes and ticks. If only I wasn't allergic to it, I would surround my house with these plants.
On the way home, we passed a Wood Stork fishing in a pond.
We paused to watch him use one foot to stand and the other to stir up the water and pond bottom. Then, he would snap up any fish visible in the murkiness.
Here he has just drawn his foot out of the water and is going for his dinner. Can you see his foot? It's real ugly - as ugly as homemade sin. That's your southern phrase for the day and, no, I have no idea what store-bought sin looks like, but I'm pretty sure you can find it at the mall.
And that was the end of our first Fall bike ride. No one perished and it only took me three days to recover. Hooray!