Visit a nearby marsh or wetland.

“As we went further into the wetland, searching for a good spot for our first logger, the natural beauty of a place that, at a glance, looks like an unexciting mass of plants with the occasional pool began to show itself. I was surprised with my first encounter with sea lavender, whose light purple flowers stood out against the rest of the marsh. In a small pond, we found a collection of tiny shells brought in by the tide. Dragonflies darted around us, and in the distance a few great egrets staked out their morning meal. Breaking through a row of cattails, we scattered a group of sparrows nesting in the area. As we approached our first site, a deer flicked its white tail and disappeared into the bordering woods. The wetland was full of life!”

“My first impression of it was that it was just very, very blue. It was a sunny day, and the view was mostly open water, with many reflections and plenty of places for birds to perch (and there were lots of birds about…). The walk was a simple boardwalk, 1.5 miles out and back: I figured on it taking under an hour. I was wrong. There was far too much to watch and to photograph for that.”

“I haven’t spent much time by the ocean, growing up in the midwest, so I was expecting the Great Marsh to be a strange new landscape for me to discover. And in some aspects it was, with what looks like rolling fields of grasses situated in the middle of salty ocean water instead of the farm fields and grasslands I’m used to passing by.”