Which means you will have to get up early, before dawn even!

Because you can’t do the dew if the sun dries it up before you get there.

But it’s worth the extra effort of getting up and out of the house.  The dew lets you see things you might have overlooked in the middle of the day. . .

. . .or which simply does not occur in the heat of the midday sun.

The spiders were very, very busy at the marsh yesterday.  They must have captured lots of dinner, because just about every web I saw had insect-size holes in them.

And I saw a lot of webs.

Ewww.

Note to self:  Don’t go traipsing around in the brush. . .unless you want to emerge with pantlegs full of sticky spider webs!!!

Animals have to eat. . .and they are more apt to do so early in the morning.

Usually I might see a few herons and maybe some gulls on a sunny (or not-so-sunny) afternoon. . .

. . .but early in the morning there are many more of them — plus a few osprey and an eagle or two — plying the water looking for a squirmy breakfast.

I stopped counting herons once I got to 20.  They are a good barometer of marsh health — if there are a bunch of herons around, you know there is enough water to support fish.  Lots of fish.

And if there are fish, there is plankton, the basis of the marsh food chain.

And if there are plankton and fish, there are bound to be frogs and other wiggly aquatic life, turtles (and turtle eggs), plus the furry land animals that like to eat the eggs.

It’s more than a food chain. . .now it’s a food web.

Yay for the marsh!

The frogs are everywhere, too.

Why the herons didn’t snatch up a frog or two I don’t know.

Frogs are easy pickings, much easier than waiting for just the right moment to catch a fish.

But the frogs were pretty much ignored by everyone but me.

I thought they were really cute.

You’d think they would have been quieter, though, what with all those hungry birds flying around.

I mean, why advertise yourself as a meal?

But for the birds it was fish on the menu, and soggy bog plants for everyone else.

More stuff from today’s doin’ the dew:

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