We're in Maryland!

We cruised across the Chesapeake from the island of Tangier, VA to Crisfield, MD on the East side of the Chesapeake Bay. This is a fairly short cruise because Tangier is only 10 miles from the east side of the bay. Crisfield brags that it is the blue crab capital of the world and they do handle lots of blue crab caught in the Chesapeake, but most of the crab comes from Tangier where most of the crab fishermen are. Of course, we had steamed blue crab for dinner. It's a lot of work to get the meat out of 4 blue crabs, and I was lucky that our friendly waitress had been a crab picker at the crab processing plant here and showed me the best way to get the meat out.

Then we went to nearby Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge.

Of course, we wanted to see the wild horses of Chincoteague, and we did! No surprise though, they're mostly in one area and if you bring binoculars, you can see them. They're pretty pinto colored ponies descended from the old herd of wild horses here. The picture at on the top isn't what you see though, it's a blow-up from what you really see which is the lower picture above. They're pretty far away.

However, one excellent specimen of wildlife was not far away and Kathy spotted it. We were lucky to see it.

No, it's not just a squirrel... it's a very large and extremely endangered Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel. There are only about 150 of these left and they're all in this area because of the large old pine trees in the refuge that they need to live. They used to be all over this very large peninsula on the east side of the Chesapeake, but as logging reduced the stands of large pine trees, they died off except in the wildlife refuge stands of large trees. The National Park Service signs say to consider yourself very lucky if you should see one.... but this one was foraging on the forest floor about 50 ft. from us and even sat up on this log like this to eat a nut and let me take its picture! They really are very large squirrels. Luckily, we had to leave Daisy in the car (park rules). We were talking about where the name "Delmarva" Peninsula could have come from and then Kathy realized..... it's Delaware, Maryland and Virginia!

Tomorrow, we're going back across the Chesapeake to the Patomac River. We'll see the sight there for a few days and then take a side trip to cruise up to Washington DC.