Juvenile Pied-billed Grebe

The wind kept blowing for yet another day, meaning no drone flying and soggy beach walking. Neither of which we wanted to repeat. To alleviate this situation we launched on a car trip. Our purpose was to explore the lower St. Mary’s River for potential drone launching sites. Dan wanted to scout the river for any lake boat flyover opportunities. Taking Six Mile east, we first stopped at Four Mile Park, basically a city lot with water frontage. Except for an old guy floating around in his orange innertube we had the park to ourselves. Nice, but we wanted to do better. Heading further south, we stopped at Twelve Mile. Not much more than a section road, it ended up having a lot to offer. As we walked towards its eventual soggy terminus the double-track that we were following exploded with frogs, all kinds of frogs. If they hadn’t been jumping out of the way, we would have stepped on many of them. It is here that I saw the grebe. I had headed back to the car, when I saw it floating in one of the culverts along side the double-track. I snapped its photo and then it dove away. We next stopped at Dunbar Park, before continuing on to the end of the road at Conely boat launch in Munuscong. We also saw turkeys and Sandhill cranes roadside.