Paradise Creek Nature Park – Portsmouth, Oak Grove Lake Park – Chesapeake, Great Dismal Swamp, Suffolk, VA

Monday Oct 2^nd we visited 2 urban parks. The first one was Paradise Creek Nature Park in Portsmouth, VA. This 40-acre waterfront park is bringing the once presumed dead Elizabeth River back to life. Two miles of trails highlight the revitalization.

This urban park sits amongst industry and highways and was a very nice park to walk amongst the beautiful wild flowers, forest, marshes and water. We saw an interesting bird and hoped it was a Clapper Rail. Once we got home and looked at it on the computer it turned out to be an immature Yellow-crowned Night Heron.

 sculpture in the parking lot

 Great Blue Heron

 Great Egret

 path around the Elizabeth

bridge over the marsh

 Northern Mockingbird

 Cardinal

 immature Yellow-crowned Night-Heron

 One Flock sculpture by Rob Mulholland

 Enviva was founded to develop a cleaner energy alternative to fossil fuels. In particular, they wanted to offer electric utilities a fuel to replace coal, enabling them to generate power without interruption while reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. More than a decade later, Enviva has become the world’s largest producer of wood pellets – a small and seemingly ordinary product that is addressing these big challenges. They produce nearly 3 million metric tons of wood pellets annually and export pellets primarily to power plants in the United Kingdom and Europe that previously were fueled by coal, enabling them to reduce their lifetime carbon footprint. 

 Enviva

nifty way to launch your canoe or kayak....

The next urban park was Oak Grove Lake Park in Chesapeake, VA. It has a large lake and 65 acres of hardwood forest and wetlands. It’s a fishing lake. (no swimming)

 

 trail around the lake

pretty berries

Brown Thrasher

Blue Jay

We grabbed a quick lunch at Panda Express and then went back to the Great Dismal Swamp and hiked a bit on the Jericho Ditch trail.

trail

We scrapped that after about an hour and went back to the nature drive to Drummond Lake in hopes of maybe seeing a beaver or a bear. We did see very fresh bear poo however. Right in the middle of the road. HUGE and full of seeds. No photo, but we looked at photos online and sure enough it was bear poo. In hindsight, we think that is what might have spooked the deer. They weren't concerned about us, but all at once they all perked up and faced away from us and then "high-tailed" it outta there. 

Red-tailed Hawk

Starling

Lake Drummond

young one

they all looked in the opposite direction at the same time (there were 4 of them)

they're outta there!

Tomorrow we are off to visit the Nauticus Museum and the Battleship Wisconsin.

Tomorrow we are visiting the Nauticus Museum and the Battleship Wisconsin.