Category: Bicycling

I went to Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) today with the intention of bicycling the Washington Ditch Trail to Lake Drummond, which is about 9 miles round trip, having lunch and returning.  Unfortunately I got in about 2.5 miles where I reached part of the trail that was very low, grassy, and muddy.  The water on both sides of the trail was very high and had obviously washed over the trail often this spring.  I didn’t look forward to doing, on my hybrid bike, 4 miles of mud and soggy grass so I turned back.

I ended up going over to the Park HQ to see if they had updated their stock of T-shirts since the birding events there two weeks ago but they had not done so.  While there I walked the short trail that I was introduced to when taking walk with a group lead by a woman who worked at Black Water NWR in Maryland.  Thanks to that experience, I was able to locate two Northern Flickers, three or more Red-headed Woodpeckers gadding about, and a lone Screech Owl.  I saw and heard either a Eastern Phoebe or a Peewee…I can’t remember what the song was now.  I heard a Bobwhite but could never locate it.  Thanks to a couple I talked to there I heard a Yellow-billed Cuckoo and then saw one but didn’t realize it until I looked it up later in my bird book which I had left at home.

This couple commented about the fact that I was bravely wearing shorts in snake country.  They had heard and seen earlier, in the day, a five foot Timber Rattler when they were setting up to take a picture from their car.  The guy had a couple of interesting stories about snake encounters including one in which a friend of his had gotten a Timber Rattler caught up in the spokes of his bicycle while riding in Great Dismal and one about a friend of his shooting holes in his boat while trying to subdue a Water Moccasin.

Unfortunately, I returned home on the east side of the refuge and that ended up taking me almost two hours and forty minutes which, after the only twenty-five minute drive down, there made for an awful lot of driving to get in about an hour of exercise and recreation.