REELFOOT NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE.
Day 69 – Okay, so we didn’t float away last night, but it was pretty muddy out this morning. LOTS of birds flitting about, got the girls all excited. It must be mating season; the colors of the birds are much more brilliant than usual. If the sun shines today, we may get some really good pictures. But of course, the birds will need to be still at least for a few seconds.
Eastern Bluebird, Reelfoot Lake State Park, Tiptonville, TN
It was 42 degrees this morning around 8 a.m., fairly cloudy. We don’t have an internet connection, or at best it goes in & out often. Same with the phone. We stayed at this Park a year ago because it’s adjacent to the Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge. Today we have to drive about 25 minutes to the South section of this campground. That’s where the Park offices are located, within the bigger, more-visited section of the State Park. We need to check-in & reserve this campsite for however long we’ll be staying here. And that will depend on whether the NWR is flooded and whether it’s even open. Once we have our coffee we’ll be doing some driving to check things out.
We left around 10 a.m. this morning & drove to the first of several wildlife drives that are part of the NWR. The road was closed, flooded. The second road was not closed so we took it. A road that goes off it was closed though, flooded. We saw a Refuge employee driving on the road, so we stopped to ask him about the status of the various roads. Yes, much of the Refuge was flooded but some of the roads were open. That made our decision easier – we’d would reserve our campsite for just one more night & do all the open Refuge roads today.
We drove to the south end of Reelfoot Lake to pay for our campsite. The whole South section of the campground, the bigger, more-popular section, was under water. The Park Office & Visitor Center were open. When paying for our site we were told it had been flooded like this for a month. It would drain a little, then it would pour down rain again & it would rise even more. They are usually open all year; now they don’t expect to be open until April 15 at the earliest.
We drove to the most southern road of the Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge & drove that road also stopping to eat our lunches. Rob stopped a couple of times to help small turtles across the road. The water level was right up to the road, and sometimes part of the road had water over it. This can’t be good for the wildlife, either. We saw a beaver by the side of the road that wasn’t doing too well. Very sad. After driving that road, we headed farther north, taking the Refuge roads that were open. The high today reached 55 degrees, but it was windy & it only remained sunny for a little while.
We returned to town to get gas in the Honda, then headed back to the campground. We stopped to take several roads that ran close to the Wildlife Refuge, two of them part of the Black Bayou Waterfowl Refuge. We saw many Bald Eagles on these drives, being playful with each other as they were flying. Mating behavior, we think. There were isolated farms and croplands off the roads. We drove by one house that had at least four goats playing around a back yard. When they saw us, they ran & all of them tried to fit into a small barn. Some of these road were also closed & you could certainly see evidence where the water had covered the roads recently. Reelfoot Lake is a large body of water connected to the Mississippi River (which has its own share of flooding every year). Even on the road to the campground, there were houses flooded from the Lake.
We got back to the RV at 3:30 p.m. We were greeted by four excited cats who appeared to have missed us terribly, but then we discovered they had just run out of dry food. Once we refilled the bowl, they forgot we were there. We’re in the extreme northwestern section of Tennessee; tomorrow we go to southern Missouri & we’ll be crossing the Mighty Mississippi to get there.
Reelfoot Lake State Park, North Campground: The campground review from last year still applies, so I won’t type a new one. Tuesday, April 10, 2018