So I had yesterday off, and I'd been in the mood for hiking all week. This part of New England isn't especially known for its mountains (those parts are in Western Mass and CT, and especially Vermont and New Hampshire) but I'd thought about either going to one of the ridges in central CT or maybe a mountain in northwest RI... however my thought process was going, I wound up on Ninigret Island, south of Charlestown. paths4byzantium and I have both posted pictures of the Quonochontaug Breachway, which was a little west of where I went yesterday... if we had turned the other direction, we would have wound up on this long (nearly 6 km) beach/ barrier island covered with a long dunescape filled with spruce and other hardy plants. So... here are the pics.
Not really much to say. The first two seagull pics were when we were watching a gull approach a picnic basket that some guy apparently thought didn't belong to the bird. The third was when the guy apparently thought that yelling at the bird would scare it away. And the last was after he turned his back on the food, apparently thinking that the bird was gone.
Oh yeah, didn't get any pics of the terns, but I'll take any of you to go see them from June to August... they nest around that time and they're wonderful. Also, they're really really camera-shy. But I tried. The Sandpiper pic was of this annoying bird that kept on squawking up and down the breachway (between Ninigret Pond and Block Island Sound) and at one point, kept on squawking while pulling something out of the sand... I'd never before heard a bird chirp with his mouth full before that. jewfroart took the picture of that one.
And the crab picture I took just after he'd fought off a different seagull.
