I love fall

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I love this time of year. It's my favorite time and that seems to hold true no matter where I am. 

A heron on one of the canals around the Citadel.

I hadn't seen this one before, but my phone IDed it as some kind of cormorant. 

He was sitting on a log just casually flapping his wings.

The mud has tried up some, so we took the woodland trails today which Bailey prefers.

At the rate the leaves are falling now, the trees will soon be bare. 

I can't garden where we are currently and I obviously miss that, so I decided to try my hand at houseplants. We hit a pop-up plant sale about a week ago and I found some decent pots and potting soil. Things like this are less convenient living is a city, but I'm not in a rush and collected things in a few trips over a few days. We still have a lot of cardboard so I did the potting in our spare room and just vacuumed up the mess afterwards. It will be a lot of trial and error until I get some plants established that will grow under the light conditions we have available. I've already killed a cyclamen, but at least some of these should be pretty easy to grow.

Fall brings shorter days, cooler temps, and some things just close down altogether until next spring. One of those things is the local city zoo at the Citadel. Clay read that it was closing soon and we hadn't been although I've seen parts of it from the outside. This morning we went and it was a nice small zoo. I know that some folks don't like zoos, but I don't have a problem with them if they are well run. The best ones don't try to take on more than they can handle well and by that standard I think this one is pretty good. The good thing that zoos do is to introduce people to animals they would never encounter. I feel that for me, and probably many people, being introduced to animals was a big part of what made me care about them. It may not be the ideal life in the wild, but zoo animals also don't suffer the downsides of life in the wild, i.e., hunger, disease, and often violent deaths. 

A recently restored monument at one of the entrances to the park.

I love this pathway in the park when the lights come on in the evening.