We left Mark and Adrienne’s in the morning and made our way to Columbia, South Carolina where we will be staying for two days while we visit Congaree National Park. Finding nesting Northern Mockingbirds is always fun, as they can be quite tame.
The boardwalk loop at Congaree is quite spectacular. I highly recommend it to anybody visiting the south. You wind through quite a variety of habitats allowing you great views of a lot of plants while overhead in the tangles there are a lot of birds. I think that visiting here in late March or April would be quite rewarding.
A real surprise was finding cranefly orchid leaves at the start of the boardwalk, which is quite dry compared to the areas with standing or flowing water that come soon after.
Soon you traverse into extensive bald cypress swamp which was full of birds. Lots of kinglets, Myrtle Warblers and Winter Wrens.
I am always searching trees for interesting lichens and insects. This is amber jelly fungus.
This script lichen was another interesting find. I want to call it Common script lichen, but there are others in the south.
Scanning the wet areas among the cypress knees you can find some Sphagnum mosses. The common name for this one is imbricate bog-moss.
More later…
Michael's Place 