BEACH GARDEN PARK?
For somebody like retired biology teacher Stuart McCausland, who lives in Brigadoon on the otherside of the city, this little park at the Oceanfront didn't even exist until he volunteered to help on a Lynnhaven River NOWnature walk.
It's no wonder. Though the park is right off Laskin Road, finding the entrance is not intuitive.
The 18-acre park - boasting ball fields, shelters, trails and lots of neat boardwalks over a branch of Little Neck Creek - is just a hop, skip and a jump north of Virginia Beach Middle School.
It's where that big watertower is visible from Laskin Road and where you see those intriguing bridges and boardwalks across from the Farm Fresh.
The address is 2854 Kilbourne Court, but that's not a lot of help either. To reach the park entrance, head down Baltic, south of Laskin Road. Take a jog to your right on Holly Road past 30th Street and then a quick turn to your right on Kilbourne and you will be entering the park.
"I've lived here since 1959 and had never heard of VB Garden Park," McCausland wrote me.
The nature walks were scheduled to be part of Lynnhaven River NOW's fall festival in conjunction with the City's 50th anniversary celebration a couple of weeks ago. The celebration was canceled due to bad weather and so were the walks, although the fall festival was postponed to the morning of Nov. 16 at the corner of Cypress Avenue and 16th Street.
I asked Jody Ullman, Lynnhaven River NOW's education coordinator, to show me what we missed. Ullman invited McCausland to come along.
McCausland was impressed that the small park was built on the site of a former city landfill and care had been taken to help bring back the area to a semblance of its natural self. For example, pervious pavers in the parking lot and an extensive rain garden keep rainwater run-off from cars and ball fields out of the creek.
"I think it is a testament to how adaptable many plants and animals are as well as to the fact that humans can indeed help nature recover," McCausland said.
On a sunny fall day, we walked around the park. Immediately, green grasshoppers with mahogany wings and a green stripe down the back took notice of our presence and began popping back and forth off the boardwalk and onto plants. McCausland identified them as obscure birdwing grasshoppers. Once you take notice of these colorful striped grasshoppers that take over in fall, you won't forget what they are.
Mockingbirds were all around, high in the trees - mainly live oaks - staking out their berry territory for the winter by singing colorful off-tunes of every description.
Ullman pointed out little fuzzy caterpillar-like galls on the back of some of the live oak leaves, where gall wasps laid their eggs this summer. The fuzzy gall feeds the young wasp larvae after they are born.
Marsh grasses, both saltmarsh cordgrass and the invasive phragmites, had turned toasty brown. On the far edge, salicornia, or glasswort, had turned its autumn red and gave the impression the marsh was on fire.
In contrast, the marsh elder in the high marsh was going to seed. Its puffy white seedpods from afar left the impression the bushes were snow-capped.
Nearby, the season changed back to summer where tall native sunflowers were still blooming along the edge of a boardwalk. Ullman thinks the sit-up-and-notice-me yellow blooms are those of a thin-leaved sunflower. Sweet small white and purple asters also were still blooming in scattered spots.
After a fall visit, I realized Beach Garden Park is a discovery waiting to be found whatever the season.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
Attend The Princess Anne Garden Club's Party in the Park from 2 to 5 p.m. Saturday at First Landing State Park. Proceeds benefit the club and the work members have done to fund the exhibits and native plant garden at the park's new trail center. Tickets are $40 for barbecue, beer and wine, music, silent auction and more. Call 428-2285 or email sbaker320@aol.com.
Philip Gillette sent a photo of one of the first Indian pipes up this fall at Weyanoke Sanctuary in Norfolk. Woody Stephens snapped a barn spider in its web in Thalia the other day. See both photos with a Halloween flavor in Thursday Beacon's Close Encounters.
Steve Fisher sent a photo of a big, long-legged spider crab washed up on the beach near the Lynnhaven Fishing Pier. This bottom dweller must have washed up because of the recent stormy weather. (Sandal for size comparison.)
The Oceanfront peregrine falcon is back for year 17 at the Oceanfront and the two adult peregrines also are back at Town Center, reported Reese Lukei. The other day, a zebra longwing, the state butterfly of Florida out of its range here, visited my yard. See both the Oceanfront peregrine and the butterfly on my blog.
Also on my blog, see the photo that Pam Monahan sent of a goose with a grotesquely broken wing that had been shot by a pellet gun in a pond on Bellspring Road in Glenwood. About the same time a goose in a Cheshire Forest pond in Chesapeake was shot with a bow and arrow. Parents, is this the cruel work of kids running loose with weapons?
Joe Digeronimo sent a photoof commercial net fishermen hauling in spot on the Chesapeake Bay beach off Kendall Street in a stiff breeze with gulls hovering overhead for a treat.
Robert Brown, who lives off Laskin Road, photographed a house spider immobilizing a wasp in her web on his porch.
Raymond Kallman in Salem Woods sent photos of a juvenile Cooper's hawk that flew to his deck railing, where it perched for about 15 minutes to consume a small bird for dinner.
Harold Winer photographed a 5-foot long juvenile black ratsnake with its patchy black and gray coloring at Redwing Golf Course.
Donnette Glenn was walking along the Elizabeth River in River Walk when the "sheer noise of birds" caught her attention. Hundreds of warblers were in the pine trees so high she couldn't identify them, and then she saw dozens of yellow-rumped warblers in the bayberry bushes by the river.
And Pam Monahan said a scene from "The Birds" was reenacted in West Neck when hundreds of birds - grackles, starlings and other black birds descended on Signature Golf Course. "The noise was so loud, it got me out of bed and out the front door to see what was unfolding," Monahan said.