Hiking around Ijams today

Today was far too nice to stay inside, so I took a short trip out to Ijams Nature Center with my friend from Developed Reality to do some hiking and making shoot a few photos.

It turns out that spring is already here!  I saw 3 or 4 types of flowers, including ground ivy:


There was also some deadnettle and what I believe to have been a couple different types of chickweed.  No photos of these though.  There were only a couple imperfect specimens of each.

The hike was really nice - great weather, and I got to explore some new trails.  It turns out that the Imerys trail has been extended for probably another .75mi past where it used to end, and now connects to the largish sandpit on the eastern edge of the park.  It's nice to be able to make a loop of it now.

The only downside to today's hike was the massive amounts of wet and muddy trail.  Most of it was just wet, but with our wonderful Tennessee clay, it still makes footing pretty precarious.  Nevertheless, I still took some other photos, which I will now post.

Nifty fungus underside:



I dare you to make it into a maze!

It's not easy to tell, but this glass bottle was in the charred remains of what looked like a Bobcat track (the machine, not the animal )




Not much wildlife out yet, but we did see this female Goldfinch:


Don't really know what this was, but it was hanging from the tree...


Aside from all of this, we heard some crazy frogs.  There was a newly-formed swampy area, and the frogs were literally loud enough to start hurting our ears once we got close enough.  It was insane, I've never heard frogs that loud in my life.