Quidnet Beach: This beach is pretty popular with families during the summer, as its waves tend to be gentler than those on Tom Nevers, and it's not the most appropriate place to bring dogs in the high season. However, by October, the water was too cold for swimming and we had the beach almost entirely to ourselves.
Dog Mob met a lot of wildlife on this excursion. Mostly it was dead wildlife, like Mr. Dead Horsehoe Crab here:
...but some of it was very much still alive. We saw several seals quite close to the shore. I'm not sure how many there were, because they'd go under and resurface somewhere else, so it would be easy to double-count the same seal making multiple appearances. But there were at least three distinct ones that were visible at the same time.
This particular seal chomped one of the seagulls floating near it. Gobbled the bird down while its wings were still flapping on either side of the seal's head. Crookytail looked on in consternation after it happened.
We also visited Sesachacha Pond on the same trip. Sesachacha is the biggest pond on the island and is separated from the sea by only a few dozen yards of sand. In the background of this shot is yet another bit of deceased wildlife: that white puff behind and to the right of Crookytail's head is a large dead seabird.
The next couple of days we went back to the Middle Moors, exploring new corners of forest and moorland that we hadn't seen in all our other hours of crisscrossing those trails. Dog Mob never got tired of it; there was always a new deer skeleton to discover, or a new decomposing water bird, or a new bit of fox poop. Endless amazing surprises!
They chased deer and chased bunnies and chased birds. Crookytail picked up an impressive collection of new scrapes, cuts, and scabs every time he went out (he seems to have particularly tender footpads, or else is unusually hard on them, because he wears holes in the leathers of his feet EVERY TIME), and never seemed bothered by any of it.
Pongu, who is much more cautious about bulldozing through prickle bushes, never got a scratch.
I made repeated attempts to reach an enormous sinkhole that we could see on satellite view of the Middle Moors, but every time I was stymied by the impossibly thick bushes that surround the giant hole on every side. This is as close as we ever got (the hole is -- I think -- that faintly visible depression about an inch straight above Pongu's head with a reddish bush on its left side).
And that was our October trip to Nantucket.
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