April 19, 2021 - Newbury to Rowley

April 19, 2021

Welcome to Susan's Bay Circuit Diary! This blog follows my adventures with my dog Sulu hiking the Bay Circuit Trail. To get new posts in your inbox, please subscribe (see the little "subscribe" oval above). The rest of the past posts can be found using the little menu on the left. If you are curious how this all started, go here.

Trail mileage from E to the asterisk

We started at Rough Meadows Wildlife Sanctuary because there’s parking there. This was a day were were able to include Benny in the stroller since we anticipated 100% road walking. Walter joined me again today with his binoculars and was really enjoying looking at birds. We saw lots of birds but the lighting was crap.

Here’s a partial list:

Cedar waxwing

Flicker

Redwing blackbird

Bluebird

Robin

Downy woodpecker

Bobolinks!

Turkey vulture

Phoebe

Goldfinch

House finch

Mourning dove

Carolina wren

Mallard

Cardinal

Grackles

White throated sparrow

House sparrow (clearly list padding here)

Canada geese

Our route was a little weird. I decided to set the end point first - to a recognizable junction on 1A where we could return next time. That was a bunch of pretty boring road walking. On the return trip, I made sure to fork left to walk the road segment we missed last time - a quiet road abutting a wildlife management area. We found the trail markings heading north were way better than the trail markings heading south.

The train crossing was the major landmark of the trip

And it made for a photo op

As we were looking at birds in the yard of a house backing up to a marsh on Red Gate Road (is it completely shameless to use binoculars to look at the birds at a stranger’s bird feeder? Asking for a friend…) we were greeted by the homeowner, a friendly man named Dennis. He invited us to step into his yard for a better look at the birds and name-dropped some cool species that had been seen there before (white ibis!). We lingered to chat, and then continued on our way. We were caught in an unexpected sprinkle as we approached our final turnaround from Old Rowley Road to 1A, but fortunately it was light and brief. Because most of our route was adjacent to marsh, we noticed the first bugs of the season as well.

This trip may or may not have included some of the "Rowley Gap", referred to in the guide. As far as I can see, it's just a name for "more boring road walking than usual".