And Autumn Comes ...

“Summer ends, and autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.”

                        ~ Hal Borland

                         ~ 1900-1978

     ~American author, journalist and naturalist

The looming sunset of a late October day reflects the poetic beauty of autumn in the Bushkill Creek in Henry’s Woods at Jacobsburg State Park, which spans between Wind Gap and Nazareth, Pennsylvania.

Jacobsburg offers environmental education programs from the preschool environmental awareness programs to high school level environmental problem solving programs, historical programs, teacher workshops and public interpretive programs. Once the site where the famous Henry Rifle was made, the Jacobsburg National Historic District lies almost entirely within the park. Henry’s Woods offers very scenic hikes and the rest of the center grounds have multi-use trails.

The park surrounds the Bushkill Creek.

The original land for the center was purchased by the Department of Forests and Waters from the City of Easton in 1959. In 1969, additional land was purchased using funds from Project 70. This brought the total land area of the center to its present size of 1,168 acres.

The Eagles Have Landed ...

               “The Eagle has landed.”

                   ~ Neil Armstrong

                        ~ 1930-2012

At 4:18 p.m. on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong’s voice crackled from the speakers at NASA’s Mission Control in Houston, Texas. He said simply, “The Eagle has landed.” With those words, the dream President John F. Kennedy voiced in 1961 – putting a man on the Moon by the end of the decade – had at last come true. Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11, was the first man to walk on the moon.

It was wonderful to photograph a majestic American Bald Eagle and Juvenile Bald Eagle after they landed on a high perch above the Little Lehigh Creek on an early October evening at Lehigh Parkway, Allentown, Pennsylvania.

The bald eagle is both the national bird and national animal of the United States.

The bald eagle appears on our nation’s seal. In the late 20^th century it was on the brink of extirpation in the contiguous United States. Populations have since recovered and the species was removed from the U.S. government’s list of endangered species on July 12, 1995 and transferred to the list of threatened species. It was removed from the List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife in the lower 48 states on June 28, 2007.

Background texture by Jai Johnson added for artistic effect.