We drove down to Chincoteague Island because we wanted to see the NASA Wallops Flight Facility visitors center. They shoot rockets up here, and rumor has it they are going to send some supplies to the space station from here soon.
the NASA visitors center, it is closed Tues and Weds, today is Tues. Boo. We went to the Chincoteague National Wildlife refuse. Here is the light house. It is 140 feet tall, 196 stairs to the top. Of course we went up.
View of the bay side of the island from the lighthouse. There are serpentine waterways here, the islanders call them ‘guts’. Lots of oysters, clams and crabs here. John on viewing the ocean from the light house. The south end of Assateague Island, the one we were on the north end of earlier this week , it shields Chincoteague from the sea and has the national seashore on it, is in the distance. It is mostly a thick forest of trees down the center.
The lights in the lighthouse from the bottom. Not the usual set up that you see in light houses. Chincoteague is famous for it’s wild ponies. Above are the children's books written by Marguerite Henry wrote about them. Everyone but me must have read them as a child.
Here are they types of ponies found on the islands of Chincoteague and Assateague. Rumor has it they are related to the horses that survived the sinking of a Spanish galleon that swam to shore. A sign on Assateague seashore ’Public Nudity prohibited’. Didn’t seem to be a problem when we were there.
Shells on Assateague sea shore. This end of the island is only accessible by foot, so it it 37 miles of beach with no development. John at the low point of Virginia-the Atlantic ocean.
A crab getting ready to dive down his hole on the beach. The sign says Hunt in Progress, Area closed. They are hunting Sika deer, small Japanese deer, really more related to elk than deer that are an invasive species and are competing for habitat with the white tailed deer. They are trying to get rid of them. We saw some on the north part of the island, we heard them bugling like elk.
When we first saw these holes with the foot prints in the sand we thought it was lots of mice prints, but it is big crabs. One of the fresh water marshes on the island, migratory birds stop here on their way south.
Another fresh water marsh. The bus at Pine Grove campground on Chincoteague. We are the only campers here tonight.
A trio of black swans trumpeting for food and a trio of llamas at the campground, they had a menagerie of animals, also miniature donkeys, and emus.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.