Ohio State Parks have naturalist assigned to each park. The naturalist comes up with a list of activities that visitors can participate in for free throughout the summer months. This weeks was kayaking excursions, nature by kayaking, introduction to archery, reel fishing fun, meet the naturalist, gyotaku, and Saturday night at the movies.

Findley State Park (SP) has Wiz. A spry 70 year old man who loves nature and sharing his knowledge with the visitors. From our opinion, Wiz is one of the better naturalist in Ohio.

Wiz scheduled Kayak Exploration on Findley Lake departing from the old beach. Last time we were in Findley SP, the beach area was still a beach. Now, it’s been closed due to county guidelines, park requirement to meet the county guidelines and lack of use. Personally, the beach was mostly a mix of goose poop vs. nice beach sand. So, I would not want to use the beach area anyway.

The first thing was removing the kayaks from the cart.

To get into the kayak, Wiz had us go into about 1 foot of water. Since this area is mostly goose poop. All I have to say is “Gross!!”. Needless to say, the sandals were not taken into the trailer and left outside to dry. Then, the sandles were put into a bag. Instead of eating supper right away, we went for a shower. After this, we almost felt clean. Wiz said the lake has great water quality. The ecoli count was low. What about all the other eew and goow. And other nasty bacteria, parasites, molds, etc.

Even with the eew and goow of the water, we had a great time.

The first thing we saw were a lot of birds. There were 3 blue herons along the edge of the water. At first they were sunning themselves and drying their wings.

Then, one heron would fly at another heron which resulted in a squabble.

The kayak started getting too close to the blue herons. The blue herons would fly away. (I say would because this happened a couple times) I was able to get a sequence of pictures them flying away and thought it was pretty cool. You might have to zoom in to see the birds.

We saw tiny duck and babies along the water edge. Since all we had was my old cell phone and our old digital point and click camera, we were unable to get close enough to get a great picture. Someplace in the bushes below are the ducklings. Please let me know if you find them. I could not find them.

We saw a few more ducks when the naturalist was close by. The naturalist said they were wood ducks. Woohoo! We finally saw a wood duck. Unfortunately, no pictures. So, we cannot add to our sighting bird catalog.

We took various pictures and videos of us paddling around the lake.

The blue heron was less shy around John and he was able to obtain a close up picture.

The naturalist picked a flower for the other rowers. Since the flower looked like covid, Wiz then told them “you now have covid”. womp womp.

On the way back to the beach, I took a picture of the area in front of my boat. It was a beautiful relaxing scene except for having to row :-). I should have brought a rope and hand John pull me. (FYI – When in a double seated canoe, John requires me to be in front. He’s afraid I won’t paddle.) Oh what little faith he has.