![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/images\/mandan_trail.jpg\")
<\/center>If you’ve been putting off a walk down that trail, don’t wait much longer! The leaves are starting to turn color, and the weather’s starting to change as well. Soon it’ll be a cross country ski trail again! My wife and I took a nice 3 hour walk down this 5 mile path, pointing our cameras all over the place…in fact, we could have made the walk much longer but had an afternoon church service to get to!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This little crawler was sitting on a park bench I wanted to use along the Missouri River, along the walking path on the Mandan side of the river. I refer to him as Spike because of that protrusion on his … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=578"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":579,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578\/revisions\/579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/images\/spike.jpg\")
<\/center>This little crawler was sitting on a park bench I wanted to use along the Missouri River, along the walking path on the Mandan side of the river. I refer to him as Spike because of that protrusion on his posterior. I imagine it’s intended as a deterrent to any bird who might think of swallowing him. Many animals have unique defenses, and they’re neat to observe. This guy and his spike are no exception.<\/p>\n