walk pics

Some pics taken on walks this week.

What did we call this one? A Korean heron?

I'm using digital zoom at night, but this is still the closest I've ever come physically to these birds. They're very skittish. It's not as though they're attuned to movement: it's more that they're attuned to the stopping of movement. They take flight if it looks as if you're pausing and taking aim with your camera... almost as if they've evolved to avoid hunters with rifles.

These bird pics are from July 11, around 1:30 a.m.

Thursday night (July 18), I was out for a walk in the evening. It had been pissing down rain all day—true monsoon weather. Two days ago, when I went for a nighttime stroll, the ramps down to the creek level were all "blocked" by those silly electric gates, but the rain Tuesday night had been relatively light; I could have gone down had I chosen to. Instead, I did a truncated walk in my immediate neighborhood. Thursday night (only a few hours ago as I write this), there was a faint drizzle, but because of the heavy rain from morning through the afternoon, we got flooded. Once again, a truncated walk.

In the shot below, you see what appears to be a small creek paralleling a big creek. The big creek is, in fact, a creek, but the small creek is normally a bike path, now flooded and covered over. If this is anything like the flooding I've seen before, then when I walk that path in a few days, I'll find dead fish on it from the creek.

And we're flooded on the other side of the creek as well:

Again, this is why I think they moved all the construction material away from the Tan Creek (the above pics are of the Yangjae Creek): to keep the material from getting soaked in the flooding that they knew would be coming. It'll be a couple days before I can go back down to the creek level again. In the meantime, there are local parks where I can walk laps, each lap roughly a kilometer in length.

At times like these, I wish I had a light kayak (and the skill to get into and out of it!).