I am at home among trees…and turkeys too!

Our weather report called for a change from sunny and 80 to rainy and much cooler, so I headed out for a walk along the trail in Chagrin River Park before the rain began to fall. As it turned out, I didn’t need to hurry because the threatening skies didn’t lead to anything until hours later in the middle of the night. Then the thunder and lightning woke us up. The changing weather over the next 12 hours vindicated the weather forecaster, proving that he does know something about meteorology. I’m glad I took my walk in the park before the weather changed, and here is what I saw along the trail:

A rafter of turkeys

Totally oblivious of me and my camera

Another sign of Autumn

Chagrin River

View from on top of the sledding hill

Sarah and Jagger

Did you know that a group of turkeys is called a rafter? I didn’t until the turkey population in our park grew to a large size, and I began to wonder what to call them collectively. Rafter seems like such an unlikely name for turkeys, but I discovered that there are plenty of other strange names. Here are just a few

• a shrewdness of apes
• a cauldron of bats
• a gang (or obstinacy) of buffalo
• a cowardice of curs (pack of dogs)
• a parade of elephants
• a tower of giraffe
• a prickle of porcupines

How many did you know? Do you think any of them are likely names for those animal groups?There are many more, and I promise some of them will make you smile. Click here to see the whole list. I can’t help wondering who created some of those names (or why).

Thanks for joining me on my trail walk today. I hope you had fun. Meanwhile, keep walking. It’s good for your health!

Trail Walker

PS: Did you notice that along with changing the theme and header of my blog,  I also changed the tagline  to match the header? What do you think of the change?