Birds and Nature in Clarendon Co. SC

         Back to Hickory Top once again. The goal was only one bag of trash, but there was one additional item I was going to try to pick up.       If you go to places over and over again for clean-ups you'll find that you don't get everything on the first, second or even third pass through. This was a bottle I somehow walked past multiple times. Removed it on this trip.        The water level in Lake Marion is pretty low right now and in most of this edge area there was no standing water.         When I got out to where I removed the barrel a couple days prior, I found this non-native Planarian. It is amazing just how far something so small can spread.          Spots like this I had missed on previous clean-ups in the same area. It was much of the same as I had been finding.           Since I had been through this area before, filling up the bag wa...

    I spotted this barrel on previous clean-ups and with the recent heat I decided to do a walk out and only pick this one item up. The intent with this was not only to remove an item, but turn a piece of trash into something useful.         Left behind was an open spot for plants to grow and fill in. Every piece of trash sitting on a forest floor takes up space for something to live or grow.          Even though this was just a single item, this ended up being one of the harder clean-ups in Hickory Top. The heat and humidity were rough and the size of the barrel made it impossible to carry with my gear, so I had to take my gear down the path, drop it, go back for the barrel and repeat.          It took longer than I thought, still I removed something and now had material to work with on a project.         At a later date I started on turning this barrel into a planter, with the...