Canaan Valley NWR, West Virginia

There's a little marsh park with a boardwalk in the Canaan Valley Nation Wildlife Refuge, called the Freedland Trail. It's just a short walk, but it leads to a beaver-dammed bog with a bunch of dead trees.

 

 

All those dead trees would be a sad thing, except that they were full of Cedar Waxwings. I've never seen more than two at a time, so it was pretty exciting to see a flock of them. Really hard to get a shot of them, too, because they almost never stop moving. They'll perch for a couple of seconds, then off they go. See the little red "wax" tips on the ends of their wing feathers? Click on the photo to get a better view.

 

 

This panorama is one of my favorite shots from the trip - it looks so peaceful:

 

 

The farm is just across the road from the bog.

 

 

No idea what this flower is, just pretty and kind of frothy-looking. The flowers in bloom in the marsh are different from what you see in northeastern Ohio. The Highlands are said to be closer to Canada ecologically. This is the area that got snow dumped on it last week, during hurricane Sandy.

Pretty gloomy weather, as you can tell from some of the photos, but good for photography.

Potomac Highlands, West Virginia, September, 2012

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