Spring Meadow

Posted by Russ Devan (New Hanover, United States) on 10 May 2008 in Landscape & Rural and Portfolio.

I drive by this little gem of a park each time I head to my one project in Hatfield. It's a relief visiting this place for some quiet after visiting a noisy manufacturing plant. I take a very scenic backroad that passes this park because it's the most direct and traffic-free way to get there. The drive is scenic and relaxing.

Wawa Park, located in Lower Salford Township, is along the banks of the East Branch of Perkiomen Creek. A narrow one-lane bridge crosses over the creek at the far end of the park. It's one of those steel grate truss bridges that makes the cool humming sound as you drive across it (I always thought that was neat as a kid and I still do). It's narrow enough that if you and another car arrive on opposite ends of the bridge at the same time, one car usually flashes its lights to signal the other car to cross first so they both don't go on the bridge at the same time and then meet in the middle. I actually cross two bridges like that on my way. As you cross this bridge, there's a nice view of a small dam located on the upstream side.

This quiet meadow is along the bank of the creek. When I visited at the end of the day on Thursday, several barn swallows were doing aerobatics in the sky above the meadow and two red-winged blackbirds were flying here and there about the meadow. I think the blackbirds were trying to nest because they kept landing in the same general area of the meadow. Once they landed, you couldn't see them at all. It was pretty difficult trying to get a shot of one of them flying around the meadow. Eventually, they figured out that I wanted to photograph them above the meadow or perching on the grasses and decided to not cooperate at all by flying to a tree branch directly above my head.

Red-winged blackbirds were one of the first bird songs that I learned to identify as a little kid. A very large meadow was (and still is) located across the road from where I would wait for the school bus. Each morning, the same red-winged blackbird would be out and about and calling its mate as I stood waiting for the bus each morning. You couldn't miss the rich, unmistakeable O-ka-LEEEEE call it would make as it perched on the tall grasses in the meadow. It gave me something to look forward to as I trudged to school each day.

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” - Henry David Thoreau

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