A Couple Great Days

Okay, so I have aching muscles and sore feet to remind me of how much fun I’m having in Ocean City, MD. I mean, when was the last time I walked 3 miles? It doesn’t matter the walking was on the boardwalk, all one level and at a leisurely pace. It just matters there was that much energy expended. We enjoyed a quick lunch at a restaurant called Gordito’s Burritos for, what else, tacos and a side excursion for a couple of souvenirs. That pretty much took the bulk of Saturday and although there were few photo ops, I did manage to snap a couple of interesting pics. Now Sunday was a totally different matter. We traveled about 15 miles to Assateague Island, home of the Atlantic Barrier Island Wild Ponies. There is some speculation how they came to be there but genetically, these animals started out as horses about 300 years ago. Start with harsh weather conditions, add a poor diet consisting of mostly salty cord grass and no new blood introduced in that 300 years and you find yourself with an extremely hardy ruggedly built and sure footed easy keeper with the stature of a pony and general physical characteristics of a horse. Assateague Island is divided at the Maryland-Virginia state line by a post and rail fence. The bands on either side of the boundary number approximately 150; the herd on MD soil belonging to the National Park Service and the ones on VA soil the property of The Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Department. The VA bands are rounded up every July and the foals are auctioned to help maintain the maximum number allowed by the Park Service’s grazing permits.  The MD bands are not thinned in this manner but their reproduction is controlled by a hormonal injection given to select mares each year. All my life, I have longed to visit these incredible and durable horses ( ponies ) and on this day, April 14th, that dream has been realized. We approached the island by way of the Verrazano Bridge. I wondered out loud how long it would be before we saw our first pony. I had voiced a similar question of the Bison in Yellowstone. There it had taken just 30 minutes before that first massive beast appeared. This time it was only about 1 ½ minutes. We weren’t even off the bridge when I spotted  a small band of three in the distance and another group of two just a couple minutes after that. All five were quite a ways from the road so we passed on these hoping for a closer viewing opportunity. That first contact with an observable family group or band, about 20 minutes later, was at the Old Ferry Landing. There, just across a narrow shallow waterway, were 8 mature ponies, some grazed while others stood in the warm April sun just soaking it in. At first I couldn’t determine mares from stallions due to the distance but some time later, while observing them from another vantage point, I could see the chestnut with the flaxen mane and dark tail standing off to one side was clearly the one in charge. We roamed all the drivable parts, walked a few of the trails and even stopped by to check out the campgrounds. And as it happened, in one of these campgrounds, we found another small band of 4. After lunch and a check of the beach to see if there were any ponies building sand castles (j/k) we headed off with the intention of going home. We hadn’t traveled more than a mile outside the park when we had one more opportunity to observe another average sized group. This one had 7 members with one of them being much younger than the others. We took a bunch of photos from the road but then Carl suggested we might try working our way through the woods out onto a spit of land halving the distance to them. Not only did we find ourselves closer but from that vantage, we observed most of the band were slowly grazing their way closer to us. In fact, before we were done, 3 of the members would walk off the salt marsh right past us, close enough for me to reach out and touch but I kept my finger on the shutter happily snapping away. We backed out of their way and allowed them to pass without incident. You see, these are truly wild animals and no matter how used to people they have become, something can change in an instant resulting in people being bitten, kicked or run over. And sometimes the ponies’ interactions with people have lead to their deaths. Cars are the aggressor on the island where there are no natural predators to concern them. I went home a happy photographer after sighting  25 different ponies. Today, the weather was against us with a forecast of showers and cool temperatures so we decided to stay close to home. I got some much needed housekeeping done before we zipped off to the movies to see “42”. Tomorrow, the plan is to travel to the VA end of the island.  More photos of wild ponies coming up!