Okay, but could be better

The Girlfriend kayaking on Jordan lake
So first off, let me just assure you that we did get outdoors for National Get Outdoors Day (which was Saturday) – The Girlfriend and I took the kayaks out on Jordan Lake for a short excursion. “Short,” in part, because we’re still not conditioned to long kayak trips yet, but also because I had to be at work that afternoon. It was good to use the weekend for weekend stuff, or at least what most people think of as weekend stuff, which is relaxing and having fun. It doesn’t happen as often as we’d like… and by “we” I suspect I’m speaking for a lot of us.

The author kayaking on Jordan Lake, or at least the bow of his kayak
I feel obligated to say that these were taken [shudder] with a smutphone, but at present that little $20 jobby is the only thing I’m risking this close to water, and even then it was in a sport pouch. Perhaps later on I’ll be doing some real photography from the kayak – we’ll see how it goes.

But that’s not the topic of this post; the topic is last night. I have been working towards a kickass macro video rig, and yesterday evening it got a brief test, which seemed to be working fine – and then a component appeared to fail. Still working out the details, and I plan to be back with a video example as soon as I’ve got everything worked out. Right now, the clips I have are of a Copes grey treefrog and a six-spotted fishing spider sitting motionless for the camera, which might as well be still photos for all the action you can see, so I’m not going to bother uploading that. The point of macro video is, naturally, to show action, behavior, and interesting rude gestures from the wildlife that I encounter, and we’re still working up to that.

Later in the evening, as I sat at my desk figuring out the issues with the rig, I started hearing the faint rumbles of something, which could have been a neighbor wheeling their garbage cans to the curb, but they were going on too long and too frequently for that, so I checked the real-time lightning map to see what was happening. Sure enough, there were electrical storms in the region, though the map wasn’t showing any terribly close. I’m not sure if there was an updating issue (which I suspect) or if it simply wasn’t responding to the primary cloud-to-cloud activity, but on actually setting foot outside (even though it was Sunday now,) I could see the flashes, so I gathered camera (the real one) and tripod and went out to the pond.

lightning illuminating the clouds without appearing
The vast majority of what I saw was like that above, or worse; the activity was a little too distant for the low cloud cover, and just about every place locally has trees just like this which limit the low-angle view. Storms are best seen from places like mountaintops (not around here,) the beach (no luck while we were out there, though the report listed the possibility for several days of our stay,) or someplace like Kansas. Nonetheless, until I’m getting paid The Big Bucks for such things, I’ll just keep living right here and do what I can.

visible lightning bolt trying to hide behind the trees
lightning behind tree againAnd then, of course, you get the distinct bolt that just happens to appear behind an obscuring tree limb, even when the primary activity centers were on either side. In fact, I encountered the same thing with a storm last year, as seen to the left – distant activity mostly obscured by both clouds and the nearby horizon, and when something finally shows, it’s behind a tree from my perspective. You have to have a lot of patience with lightning photography.

Lightning hiding behind a tree yet againThat same storm had it happen again, this time behind another tree. A lot of patience – it helps to remind yourself that this is only random and the ancient gods, like Fate and Sniggering, don’t really exist.

By the way, I did finally get a more distinct bolt in that storm, seen below. I’d prepped these images for a post then but never did write it up, so they’re being used now before they go bad.

lightning finally hitting the gap between the trees
But back to last night. There was no rain, but a stiff breeze and pleasant temperature, and with the light show it was actually a nice night to be out. The frogs could still be heard calling down near the end of the pond, and the occasional plop! from fish taking a shot at the night insects would sound near my feet. Meanwhile, I just kept firing off the frames, hoping to capture something compelling. Eventually, I got a couple of simultaneous bolts that stretched across the sky.

lightning bolts extending sideways across the sky
I feel it necessary to point out that this is shot at a 10mm focal length, which is someplace close to a ninety-degree view of the sky, so in person it appeared much more impressive. There were two primary centers of activity, though, spread well apart, so I was set to capture either one in any frame. Which is a little foresight from having done this too many times before; the region to the left was far more active, at least flash-wise, and had I focused tighter on that I would have missed this display, so go me, eh? And yes, I missed at least two visible bolts in the very brief periods between the long time exposures, averaging a second or three not shooting between 10-30 seconds with the shutter open and capturing, very often, nothing. Perhaps there really is a god of Sniggering.

But hey, that wide angle of view? It paid off a little better just a few minutes down the road.

both active regions of the storms showing visible lightning bolts
That’s both active regions showing bolts in the same single exposure (which happened to be ten seconds in length.) I knew when I captured it that this particular storm was unlikely to produce anything much better. You can compare the two images above, which are the exact same framing, to see how much the clouds have changed in just a few minutes, but in person this wasn’t really noticeable – the light in the frame is mostly from the very brief duration of the bolts, with the ambient light from the nearby cities too dim to show much other than overcast. On occasion, I get some nice sequences which will show the progression of the storm clouds, but this isn’t obvious until I get back and unload the memory card.

I was noting, however, that the active region to the left seemed to be drawing closer, and the breeze was getting stiffer, often evidence of air being pushed ahead of a front – I guessed that rain was imminent. One bright flash gave me some hint of this, but again, this is so brief in person that you have to get a solid impression from the fraction of a second, which isn’t always accurate. The image yielded a lot more useful info, but after getting stung a few times with missed bolts, I was keeping the time between exposures (which also means the time peering at the preview images on the LCD back of the camera) to a bare minimum. Now we can see what I only got a fleeting impression of then.

bright and close lightning strike mostly obscured by rain
If I’d opened with this image, you might have believed that this was a daylight storm, or perhaps close to sunset, but then again I would have destroyed the elaborate narrative that makes these posts so captivating. Regardless, you can tell this one is a lot brighter and closer than anything else that I’ve shown you, or captured, and the crack of thunder was quicker in coming – this was only a few kilometers away to the northwest. The bolt is primarily obscured by the rain, which was illuminated by the strike, with a few tendrils visible off to the side, appearing from around the edge of the rain, I’m thinking. Let’s take a closer look at that portion.

cropped inset of same frame
That certainly seems quite bright, like a blast of plasma signaling that a Terminator is arriving, making the visible branches of the lightning (there’s another at the treeline to the left of the obvious one) look trivial. That’s a close strike within a heavy rain, and a bit foreboding.

Almost immediately after this, I was aware that the flashes were now extending much more overhead, meaning I was underneath the active region and much closer to a strike zone – not a good place to be. I could also see a block of low-level clouds moving rapidly into the area, which if nothing else would obscure any lightning except that too close for comfort but might also herald the arrival of the rain, so I started packing my stuff up. The hike back to the house is three to five minutes, just to give you an idea. I was rounding the end of the pond as the first serious drops started falling, but was only halfway along the path that ran the width of the pond (the shorter side, which you’re looking across in these pics though the wide-angle gives an incorrect impression of how narrow it is) as it started pouring. I got soaked in that brief period before reaching the house, but the camera bag is water-repellent and I unpacked the equipment as soon as I was indoors – this is far from the first time that that’s happened, and too quickly to get out the disposable rain poncho that I carry routinely.

I was going to have a little addition to this post, because after changing my shirt, I stepped out onto the porch (mostly shielded from the rain) to record a sound file of the rain and thunder. I’ve done this before, but with a different recorder and without the driving wind that was now occurring, so this time around the audio quality was too poor to share. I had, for instance, lost the windscreen on the mic that I was using last night, so there’s lots of wind thumping, but also the wind chimes nearby and just the bad acoustics of the rain, so that linked audio post is a much better experience. And had it not been so dark, it might have been interesting to get video of the rain whipping past in sheets, falling at a diagonal and sailing off of The Girlfriend’s parked car out front as if it was tooling down the road at 100 kph. Definitely haven’t started the summer drought yet.

Per the ancient lore, part 13

Cape Canaveral launch pads 39A and 39B from Merritt Island
This week, the folder selection for our archive digital shots is ‘Space.’ If you’re viewing this image and thinking it doesn’t look very spacey, well, how you could be so ignorant? Look again, you oblivious savage. Those structures are launch pads 39-A and 39-B at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, the very places where every space shuttle mission, and for that matter every Apollo mission, began. If you’re on your way to the moon, this is where you board.

The photo was taken from Playalinda Beach Road on Merritt Island, which is where the Cape is located – it’s no surprise that this is right outside the property of the space center, and in fact this region was always closed off during launches (and I think landings as well, since the Canaveral Skid Pad, the landing strip for the shuttle, sits about 5 kilometers off to the right of where this picture was taken.) The nearest pad, to the left, is 39-B and is less than 5 km distant, while 39-A on the right side is a little over 7 km off. The Vehicle Assembly Building is well out of the frame to the right, but was still plainly visible from this location – and in fact, is plainly visible from just about anyplace in this region of Florida, due to its own height and the flatness of the land.

The kind of triangular/semicircular portion of those launch gantries was the payload section, which was hinged and would fold closed over the shuttles after they reached the launch pads. The water towers nearby were solely for use during launches, flooding the pads with water as noise and vibration suppression – if you look at any photo or video of the shuttle launches, the huge clouds of white smoke that you see aren’t smoke, but water vapor from this water – the rocket exhausts were either darker, for the solid rocket boosters, or virtually nonexistent for the shuttle main engines. And I’m speaking in the past tense here because these launch gantries no longer exist – they’ve been taken down and rebuilt, with SpaceX using pad 39-A for the Falcon launches and 39-B being refitted for the new Space Launch System.

The foreground, unsurprisingly, is swamp, with a few birds visible here and there; most of the Cape is wetlands, and I recall reading an article by one of the people tasked with finding a location for the nascent space program, back in the 1950s. His reaction to this proposed location was almost of horror, and he distinctly recommended against this boggy, alligator-infested, mosquito-breeding-capital of a candidate – it seems his vote was discounted (there were other mitigating factors, some of which I’ll be happy to relate if anyone asks.) Even after the decades of development by NASA and the USAF, the region is still boggy and alligator-infested, but enough dry land was discovered/created to prevent launch vehicles from disappearing into the marsh. Seriously, check it out on Google Earth or the aerial photo service of choice. It’s a cool place for wildlife photography, especially Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge only a few kilometers from this point.

A little trivia. This photo was taken in May 2004, a little over a year since the Columbia had broken up on re-entry over Texas, and the pads were sitting dormant while the program was in examination. On the day of the accident, I was actually driving up to within visual distance of the landing strip and realized that I should have checked the timetable – I might have been able to see the landing while I was there. The accident occurred while I was in the car, and I heard about it as soon as I arrived. And just to give you an idea of the velocity of the incoming shuttles, that mission was due to touch down at 9:16 AM in Florida, but broke up at 9:00 AM over Texas and Louisiana while traveling approximately 21,000 kilometers per hour (13,000 mph.) Touchdown speed for the shuttle was about 330 kph, so all of that speed had to be shed in that timeframe.

By the way, if you look up the area on Google Earth, slide westward over to the landing strip (it will be abundantly obvious) and the service road that runs from the southern end of it, then roll the date back to March 1994 – you can see a shuttle being towed from the Skid Pad back to the Vehicle Assembly Building. That would be STS-62, Columbia itself, having just returned earlier that day from its mission.

No excuses now

North Topsail Beach just after sunset
Hey! I’m betting you forgot that Saturday – that would be June 9th – is National Get Outdoors Day. And the walk from the house to the car doesn’t count; you’re being graded on this, so let’s see some real effort put into it. If you don’t have some chewed-up areas on your hands and at least five bug bites come Sunday morning, you weren’t trying hard enough.

And if your boss is telling you that you’re supposed to be working that day, we’ll have none of that nonsense. Give me their number – I’ll take care of it. Rest assured, you’ve got someone with some pull on your side now.

So go do something fun, or perhaps even environmentally beneficial, like leaving the gas-powered whatsit aside and going on strictly human power. Ignore the toy phone for a while (and that includes selfies.) Whatever, there are no guidelines or rules, just get out there where the observing aliens can see you so they can do an accurate head count. And try to have some fun while doing so. I will, of course, be back with anything blogworthy that I came across myself.

It’s not like I need the practice

This is one of those things that I think I’ve been preventing myself from really accepting, but I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I fucking hate working on cars.

Which might seem odd, given how often I have to do it. I’m not a mechanic by any stretch, but the word “shadetree” often appears about this point; routine maintenance poses no issues, and I can generally handle moderate repairs, but the ability to diagnose, for instance, why the car keeps stalling usually means a lot of research. I started learning how to work on cars early on, by not being able to afford the costs of mechanics, and unfortunately that condition has persisted most of my life, not at all helped by a) being galled by how much a garage actually charges, and b) finding waaayyy too many garages that utterly suck. So, ninety percent of the time, I do it myself.

And it’s not like I’m speaking out of frustration because I’m so unsuccessful (with cars, I mean) – most times the car gets properly repaired and back on the road, albeit a little slower than a garage might have accomplished (might.) While I am often working from a Haynes or Chilton manual for the particular vehicle (and I highly recommend these, by the way,) the problem usually gets fixed, and doesn’t reappear.

Listen, here’s how it goes. I’ll look over the repair necessary, either visually on the car or within a manual or online guide, and it’ll be something along the lines of, “remove these two bolts and this wiring harness, and lift the assembly off of the mounts.” And I begin work. Two hours later, I’m filthy, bleeding from two knuckles, have gone out and picked up a new tool that I didn’t have (or even made one,) and the fucking assembly is still attached to the mounts. When people tell me their car is falling apart, I’m tempted to buy it from them because it’d be a hell of a lot easier to work on than what I typically see, which is a car resolutely determined to stay together no matter what. Bolts seize, parts rust, and on occasion I think auto manufacturers actually cast false bolt heads onto the side of housings just to fuck with idiots like me. WD-40 and other such ‘penetrating oils?’ Don’t make me laugh – they’re fine for a screw on your toaster, but not much else, because there’s no actual gaps for them to penetrate into on the very parts where they’re needed the most.

It does not help that auto manufacturers actively try to thwart the DIY mechanic, designing cars with poor access or working space, a lack of bracing or leverage surfaces, something else that has to be removed just to get at the part in question, or most especially, the necessity of a specialty tool. Of course they want you to take the car into the dealer or ‘authorized’ service center – and if you’ve seen the labor charges or parts markup at such places, you know damn well why. And while it’s easy to believe that the mechanics there always know what they’re doing, it’s also not the case anywhere near often enough.

It’s also easy to believe that having a “full set of tools” will allow you to tackle more repairs with ease, but there really is no such thing – there are more tools dedicated to singular tasks in auto repair than you can imagine, even without automakers’ efforts. You can have an entire rolling tool chest full of stuff and still have to get that 34mm axle nut socket or the fuel pump retaining ring wrench – and of course, use this once. The only time you’ll end up needing it again is after you’ve sold it to someone else.

As you might have surmised, I’ve been doing a bit of auto repair work lately, both on The Girlfriend’s car and then her Sprogs’ before the trip to the beach, and on my own after we got back – the best I can say is that the former two only ran into minor complications each. Mine had been waiting for both spare time (knowing it would take a while) and the ability to use another vehicle while it was incapacitated. We are, of course, a few days past the time I allotted for getting through these repairs, even given the extra time I added because I’ve done this kind of shit far too often. Right at the moment I’m trying to find someone with either a hydraulic press or a jackhammer…

So, yeah, I’m pretty damn sick of it all. Eventually, I accomplish what I set out to do, but not without an awful lot of cursing.

Per the ancient lore, part 12

Taking yesterday’s cue, we’re going to feature two images today for the ancient lore, both taken on the same day – one at close to 3 AM, and the other at 8:30 AM; I’m fairly certain I got a little sleep in between those, but can’t say for sure…

The folder is Science/Miscellaneous, which collects mostly things like weather phenomena and then everything that doesn’t fit into other categories. The first is… well, I shot it for some kind of poignancy, but soon realized that it doesn’t really carry that, and over the years I’ve looked at it and utterly failed to find a use for it – save for here, after which I may simply discard the frames.

hog jawbone covered in barnacles
That’s – the lower jaw of a pig, likely a wild pig, found in the shallows of my primary haunt in Florida. One season, someone discarded the carcasses of a couple of pigs right there, much to my annoyance, and later on I found this jawbone, studded with barnacles and blackened by who-knows-what. I perched it on the stump that sat on shore and has appeared several times on this site, but really, it just ain’t doing it.

I’ll take a moment to mention that the ‘wild’ pigs of Florida are actually domestic pork pigs that have escaped, or been released, and set themselves up a feral existence in the state, which somehow seems to encourage that kind of jazz. But no, these are not ‘boar’ or anything similar, and on occasion you can spot striped varieties. I’ve seen them a handful of times but never got any photos.

Now the next, which was actually the earlier of the two.

Eau Gallie causeway by streetlights
There’s nothing fascinating about this one either, but it was the first attempts to do some light trails across the causeway bridge – that red line is from the sole car that went through, so a time other than three AM is certainly better for traffic. And it has two little bits of trivia all its own.

The first is a story. One evening/morning, but I don’t think it was this morning, I was at the left side of the bridge shooting a long exposure out over the water, likely of a moored sailboat dimly visible in the ambient light, and decided to switch to the other side to see what could be found there. I crossed the horrendously busy lanes and reached the center barrier, which was about a meter high, swung my legs over it, and let myself down to the other side.

Except, the streetlight right over that immediate vicinity was out, which can actually be seen in the center of this pic if you look closely, and I was peering out across the water to scope out any potential. You may have already realized my mistake, but I’ll point it out if you haven’t: the lanes are, for reasons unknown, two different heights right at that point. Completely unaware of this, I swung my legs aver and expected a slight drop of a handful of centimeters, and actually fell more than a meter. There is the shortest experience of falling terror that occurs in such circumstances, before my straightened legs slammed into the road surface below and sent the shock right up my spine. I staggered but somehow managed to remain upright, then looked around to check if, by any remote chance, someone had seen me perform this graceless maneuver.

[You may be looking at this and thinking, What the hell, how could he have missed that? but I’ll remind you that this is a time-exposure, collecting a lot more light than was readily visible by eye, and even with this, you can see how dark it gets right there. But yeah, it would have been obvious had I looked down.]

Eau Gallie causeway in separated RGB color channelsNow for the second bit, discovered when doing some editing some time back; I even prepped and saved an illustrating image, but ended up not using it. Until now. The streetlamps are sodium pressure bulbs, putting out that curious orange glow, which looks reasonably accurate in digital but renders much worse in Fuji Provia slide film. However, this provided an overall orange cast to the image – accurate for the conditions, but not exactly white-balanced, you know? So I tried editing the image to bring it more in line with white light, and couldn’t even come close. Then when attempting something else, I looked at the separate color channels and found out why.

That’s each right there, and as can be easily seen now, sodium lamps put out virtually no blue wavelength, or at least none that can be captured by the digital camera I was using. To counter an orange cast, you’d want to increase the blue channel and reduce the red, but the blue channel had no effect whatsoever except for the glare from the bulbs themselves, and even then it was trivial. Just for giggles, I selected the blue channel and blew it out to almost maximum, what would normally be a radical overexposure, and got the faintest hint of reflected light only from shiny surfaces near the bulbs. It makes me wonder what the particulars are about that wavelength, since it reaches the camera directly, albeit weakly (that’s why the glare from the bulbs is still visible in the blue channel) but virtually everything that it shines on doesn’t carry away. It could just be extremely weak I guess.

That’s the kind of useless pondering I get up to sometimes…

Thank you, May I have another?

‘Tis the last gasp of May, and that means it’s abstract time! You’ve been bouncing up and down in your seat the entire month, haven’t you?

I am finally recognizing that making difficult decisions can induce a lot of stress, which is not good for your health and even less so for mine, so I decided not to decide (wait a second) which image from the beach trip was going to win the coveted position, and I’m simply putting them both up. If you want to shorten your life over the whole matter, you can decide on your own which is best. I’m not going to read any comments regarding this post, because that would be stressful too. Right now I’m even making someone else type this…

scattered tidal deposits
For the first, we have this little tableau found on the beach one morning as the tide receded. The little bit of greenery is what makes it, I think, but I’ll also point out the countless holes from small mollusks that were carried in by the tide and deposited, which then buried themselves quickly to escape the wading birds – you can occasionally see this happen as the water thins down to the last few millimeters, if you’re sharp-eyed.

sanderling Calidris alba foraging on flood plain
And the second comes from a small ‘pool’ in the marshes almost directly alongside the gazebo of the condo complex, which at low tide becomes an exposed mud flat. When the water level was ideal, sanderlings (Calidris alba) would often be found foraging in the shallows, mostly for small crabs I suspect, since the surrounding marsh grasses probably prevented much else from getting in there. From last year’s experience, I skipped wandering out there to see what could be found, since there was a high likelihood that I’d bury myself to mid-calf, at least, in the muck of the marsh. Yeah, I know I make a big deal out of the lengths I’ll go to for a shot, but I’d like to keep my sandals, plus oysters are incredibly sharp little bastards. Although I’ll make that extreme sacrifice if someone wants to fund the efforts…

It’s been a bit turtley lately

Back a couple of weeks ago, I featured a teaser image from a recent outing, one that I’m finally getting back to – but in the interim, we did that trip to the beach, which only added to the pattern that had been established. I don’t honestly think there’s anything more than coincidence at work here, but I’ll take advantage of it all the same.

The last outing that I made before we had to get everything ready for the trip was to Duke Forest, which is normally a decent place to find snakes. This time around the snakes were fairly scarce, and instead we were seeing turtles (among a few other subjects.) In a small pool formed by the fluctuating water levels in the creek, I unearthed a very small common snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina) while chasing very small crayfish – if you want to see those you’ll have to refer to Mr Bugg’s blog, if he ever decides to post them, since I was the one holding them and didn’t have the ability to shoot them at the same time. But after allowing him to get his own pics of the snapper, I handed it over to him to hold while I shot a few frames.

young common snapping turtle Chelydra serpentina being held in palm
It remained, for the most part, pretty docile for a minute or two, then decided it had had enough and began gaping and extending its head, looking for something to register its displeasure on in that special way snappers have, and so we returned it to the pool. There were plenty of crayfish in there to feed upon, and should those disappear, the creek was only a few meters away.

A little later on, I was looking across the creek from the spillway crossing and noticed a suspiciously dark smooth rock on the bank, a bit too far for a decent identification by eye, but a longer lens was sufficient to confirm my guess that it was another small turtle basking.

juvenile river cooter Pseudemys concinna basking on bank
Looking at its surroundings, I figured there was a decent chance to creep up on it from the shore, and so I made my way around and sprawled out on the bank behind the rocks to approach it, peeking up briefly to get my bearings, and then used the largest rock as cover until I could slip my hand around and cut off the turtle’s escape, which worked better than I’d hoped. Somehow, though, Mr Bugg was taking photos of my stalking right up until I made the capture when he stopped, and so there are no photos of this endeavor (I’m going to have to work on his photojournalism skills.) Still, we were able to do the nice scale and detail images that we were after.

juvenile river cooter Pseudemys concinna in palm
As I said earlier, I initially considered this a pond slider, but later determined that it was a river cooter (Pseudemys concinna,) mostly through the pattern on the plastron (belly) that I neglected to get any photos of. I’m still trying to impress upon myself the need to get a wide range of illustrations while I have subjects handy.

No, that’s not at all close enough – let’s go in tighter on that same frame.

profile of juvenile river cooter Pseudemys concinna
Isn’t that adorable? Of course it is – I don’t even know why I ask.

juvenile river cooter Pseudemys concinna making good its escape
After our pics, we let it go back into the water right where it had been basking, and it (unsurprisingly) headed out into deeper water away from the bank as I followed its progress with the longer lens.

juvenile river cooter Pseudemys concinna basking atop rock in creekBut it didn’t go very far at all, actually. Within a few meters it found a rock protruding from the water and selected that as its new basking spot, pausing alongside and surveying the landscape for a bit to determine if it was safe – that’s the image that went with the teaser post. We left the immediate region and did a little more exploring, but when we came back a short while later, the same turtle was now basking in its new spot atop the rock, and wasn’t very concerned with our approach despite having a very clear view of us. I would have thought that, having been captured, it would have been exceptionally wary afterward, but then again we did get some flattering photos, so perhaps ego played a role here.

I’m going to take a brief break here to tackle another subject while we’re still talking about Duke Forest, before we move on to Topsail Beach and the finds there. Chronologically I’m mucking about, because the following was actually our first find of the day, but I’m going to use it as an intermission.

Right alongside the trail leading down to the creek, I spotted a snake curled up in the sun – not exactly a significant accomplishment given the coloration and the light, but it was partially hidden under a plant. I initially pegged it as a black rat snake, but as we maneuvered for a portrait angle, I realized we had something different on hand.

eastern hognose snake Heterodon platirhinos just chillin
That upturned snout is indicative of an eastern hognose snake (Heterodon platirhinos,) a species that has a remarkably broad range of coloration. While it’s easy to believe this image reflects an irritated demeanor from those ‘frowning’ eyes, that’s just skull structure, a supraorbital ridge that helps shield the eye, and indicates no emotion one way or another – most snakes have them to some degree, as do many raptors.

But hognose snakes, in fact, have a fantastic pair of responses to threats, and after we got our first images, I began trying to provoke either (or both.) Of course, when you’re counting on a critter to be defensive, it turns out to be remarkably docile, and displayed neither trait even as I picked it up. I’ll refer you to this page in the main gallery (a different species but closely related) as an example of both of those defensive behaviors, and a color variant that the eastern hognoses can be found in as well, save for a small difference in belly patterns.

eastern hognose snake Heterodon platirhinos being far too agreeable
Once again, we have that apparent glare while the snake was actually being as tame as a duckling. I might have expected this had the night been cold, producing more of a torpor state from the reptiles we’d encountered, but no, it was plenty warm enough for exuberant activity – sometimes you just have cooperative subjects. I’m not knocking it, mind you.

Okay, back to the turtles. On our first morning out at North Topsail Beach, after shooting the sunrise, I headed out behind the condo in the narrow band between the buildings and the marshy sound, and let me paint this picture for a second. We have the beach, and just behind the main dune sits a row of rental condos. Then the parking lot and the road, then another parking lot and row of rental condos, including ours. Then a small backyard of grass, bordered by a thin row of dense trees before you hit the sound. That’s literally an eight-meter wide bit of land for anything that likes grass and bushes and so on (though it probably widened off to either side of us, since we were on a very narrow portion of the island.) This might have made our backyard a kind of highway, the only patch of safe terrain for critters moving north and south, though ‘safe’ is a loaded term, because I was there! And I can’t recall whether I heard a faint rustle of movement or not, but essentially looked down alongside the small boardwalk to see this first sample of terrapins from the trip.

female eastern box turtle Terrapene carolina carolina
This is an eastern box turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina,) the state reptile of North Carolina – well, not this particular specimen, to my knowledge. This is likely a female, judging from the brown eyes and the flattened plastron not visible here. Like most box turtles, she went motionless as danger/photographer loomed, but made good time once I left her alone, as I found when I went on down to the gazebo for a few minutes and returned, then returned again with The Girlfriend to show her my find; by that time I had to reveal her in her hiding spot under a bush, which might have been her napping area in the heat of the day.

very young eastern box turtle Terrapene carolina carolina trying to be subtle
I did it again the next day, this time slightly further off but still in the backyard (technically the neighbor’s, but it was all a shared area under the HOA.) I was able to use the early morning sun to light this diminutive example that was no more than 8cm in length, about a third of adult length (so much less than that in overall mass.) This is also an eastern box turtle, so you can see the variation in carapace coloration that can occur – and something else. Look carefully at the ridges on each scute (section or ‘shield’ of the shell.) This one is likely only two years old, since there is only one surrounding perimeter outside of the central hump on each scute, and compare this against the previous specimen, which is at least eight years old, but it looks to me more like ten – yes they grow a ridge every year, and the size of the ridges tells of their health and growth rate, some years being better than others.

By the way, to get this perspective I had to lie flat on my belly in the early morning dew and got moderately soaked. I’m not complaining, I just don’t want you thinking that I’m not putting in the effort for you.

I found another on a grey morning with bad light, when the macro flash rig was still up in the condo, so the handful of frames that I shot were all blurred by my motion and I discarded them. It’s not like I didn’t already have turtle photos. In my region of central NC, box turtles generally like a decent tree canopy and are most often found in the woods, blending in with the leaves very well, but at the beach of course there isn’t any such thing as a canopy, just little copses of trees here and there, so the turtles tended to spend more time in the open, though largely at night I suspect.

And the last, taken the day before we left.

male eastern box turtle Terrapene carolina carolina looking curmudgeonly
This is likely a male, judging from the red eyes, but I didn’t inquire as to what it personally identified as. Turtles often have this ‘disapproving schoolmarm’ look to them, and to the extent that they have emotions, this is probably at least partially accurate when I’m getting down into their face like this. I’ll keep an eye open and see if I can show you a happy turtle someday, so you can contrast the expressions.

Another tighter crop from the same frame, mostly for the eyes:

tighter crop of same eastern box turtle Terrapene carolina carolina
Have I mentioned how much I like the Mamiya 80mm macro lens for this kind of work? I mean, within the past five posts? I’d hate for you to forget.

Oh, what the hell. One more, off-topic, for giggles.

author in hat holding racer Coluber constrictor, by Wendy Hall
That’s me (the one on the right) holding another backyard find, what I’ve always called a black racer but it appears just ‘racer’ is the accepted common name, but either way it’s a Coluber constrictor. Which is funny, because they don’t constrict, unlike their almost-identical counterpart the black rat snake. I had just emerged from under the condo (most beachfront buildings are on stilts in NC – hurricanes, you know) and heard a rustle under the bush alongside me. I froze of course, to seek out the source, and immediately spotted my friend here with its head raised about a meter away – always pay attention to the sounds that ‘don’t belong.’ I maneuvered into a capture position, it darted off across the open grass, and I gave pursuit, much to the amusement of our friends watching from the balcony above. Unlike the rat snakes, racers often defend themselves vigorously, as can be witnessed by the blood spots on my fingers from several bites as I got a hold of it. You can also spot the ‘open’ vent towards the tail of the snake, evidence of their other means of defense, which is to defecate on you – it has a very distinctive smell that you won’t forget.

Two things I’ll point out before I go. You can see here the traits which will distinguish this species from a black rat snake, which are the evenly-colored belly only a shade lighter than the back (rat snakes usually have white with black patches,) and the smooth scales on the back – rat snakes have ‘keeled’ scales, a tiny ridge that runs down the center of each, visible in the right light. And of course, if it bites exuberantly as you try to pick it up, it’s likely a racer. Meanwhile, I’m standing on or right alongside the boardwalk that ran immediately behind the condos, while that treeline behind me marks the outer boundary of the lawn and the start of the marshy edge of the sound – that’s the whole backyard, where I found all of these specimens, and the narrow corridor of natural conditions that they had to work with. Not too shabby for an area too small to play a game of Whiffle Ball within…

Lucky I have something

You are well aware, naturally, that today is Relate Something That Happened Last Night That Has Nothing To Do With Alcohol Day (that modifier put in there to prevent things from getting really fucking boring, because who needs to hear yet another story about people with no self-control?) and, as fate would have it, I have a nice little tale – had the holiday fallen any other time this week, it would have been something about, like, laundry. So here’s my contribution.

Returning from the nearby pond where I’d been getting more post fodder to appear later on, I was right by the neighbor’s house when I spotted a fox crossing the road into our yard. This was curious enough – it was still pretty early, and there are enough streetlights that I was plainly visible. I had my headlamp, but the batteries had been run nearly flat in my previous pursuits, yet I switched it on anyway and had a quick look around the yard as I came to it – nothing to see.

(It gets better – just park the yap for a second.)

I was just about to enter our front door when I heard a rustle and a squeal, and I switched the headlamp on again and shone it in the direction where the noises had come from as I stealthily crept down there. In the neighbor’s yard, a pair of eyes reflected the light back to me, their height and distance apart telling me it was the fox. Almost as soon as I saw this, I also found a baby rabbit crawling/scampering through the grass towards The Girlfriend’s car. I simply held still and watched the fox to see what it would do.

It became clear that the fox had not only unearthed the rabbit from a small copse of flowers and plants at the base of two trees in the center of the neighbor’s yard, it had no intention of giving up its prey easily. When it disappeared for a moment I changed position a bit, but it reappeared and I held still again, and the fox spent some ten minutes searching the area in pursuit of the rabbit – never coming anywhere near it, but that was likely my fault, since the rabbit had largely come towards me. There’s a streetlight directly across the road from our yard, so it’s never dark here, and though I was shining the (dim) headlamp in its direction most of the time, I have no doubts that the fox was well aware of my presence, and only my silence and stillness kept it from fleeing – that and the near-miss of its meal. Its persistence was impressive, because it was largely between five and seven meters from me the entire time, which is damn close for something as shy as a fox.

And I will note that I could positively identify it easily with the long observation. The dark stripe down the back and the lack of a white tip to the tail told me it was a grey fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) – we also have red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) in the area, and their coloration is often virtually the same, with the exception of the details I just noted. Yes, I know, you’d think a red fox would be red and a grey fox grey, because sense, but the truth is they often have mixes of both in their coats, and they can easily be mistaken.

Eventually, the fox slipped off after I called The Girlfriend’s Sprog down to watch the show (The Girlfriend was already in bed) – she got a brief look at the fox, but it definitely decided that things were getting too risky at that point. We then commenced a brief search for the baby bunny, knowing that finding it was not too likely – rabbits know how to hide, and searching at night by dim flashlight wasn’t ideal. We found no trace of it, so presumably it got away, with no idea what injuries it might have sustained. And there’s no telling if the fox returned a little later and made a more thorough search without our interference.

By the way, I had the Canon T2i with me, which has video capability, but the light wasn’t bright enough for either stills or video, and the headlamp too far gone (I’d been using it for other video, which will appear here eventually.) Slightly frustrating to me, since it would have been cool to have a video clip of the search efforts, but such missed opportunities happen often anyway – it was cool enough just watching the behavior from such a close position. And I have to note that the fox was utterly silent while stalking agitatedly back and forth in the neighbor’s yard, and with its coloration, it could easily have been missed entirely despite the light from the streetlamp – I was lucky enough to catch its silhouette as it crossed the road, and follow through with it from there.

Podcast: But no Annette Funicello

a pair of gulls against sunrise sky at North Topsail Beach
It’s funny; while I was in the final stages of putting this all together, I allowed myself to be sidetracked with more subjects for future posts, and just had a rather interesting evening. But I’m getting ahead of how behind I am. So for now, we have a podcast of the most recent trip, where we (meaning the family here and friends from out there, but not, you know, you and I, I’m sorry to say, unless of course it was) go back to the beach.

Walkabout podcast – Back to the beach

57 percent of the crew boogie boarding
The first post regarding last year’s trip to the same locale – there are three in total, so feel free to click through to the following posts as well. Or you can use this link for all of the posts so tagged (which will include this one, so don’t get stuck in an endless loop…)

Topsail Escape Room, because you should check it out when you’re out there. It’s likely that you can find something similar near where you live, too.

Just for the hell of it, the posts tagged with Savannah and Jekyll Island, because that’s where our friends are from and who we were hanging out with while there. They were always photographically productive trips and the posts reflect that at least.

More will be along as soon as possible – it took me long enough to get this one done. I’m presently waiting on some contributions from others to provide a more robust, nutritious post, properly following the content pyramid as it were. We’re getting there – stay tuned.

sanderling Calidris alba pacing among the surf bubbles

Per the ancient lore, part 11

party lights on sailboat in marina at night
Dammit dammit dammit dammit dammit! I still have no fucking time to work on posts! This is getting beyond annoying. I’d say I need to take a week off, but that wouldn’t actually work…

This week’s image from the mystical and timeworn days of early digital photography comes from the Scenic/Abstract folder, and shows a small marina in the Florida town that I lived within. Naturally I was struck by the string of lights on the small sailboat and took several different versions, some cropped tighter and not showing the distant glow in the sky at all. Right now, I’ll ask that you stop and look at it for a bit, see what kind of feelings and mood you get from it, to compare to my own impressions.

No, I’m serious. Stop here for a bit and look it over. Search your true feelings. Listen to your heart. Sounds about the same as always, doesn’t it? So okay, stop that and think with your brain instead.

All set?

So, I’m a little ill-defined on this one. There’s this contrast between the faint glow from the horizon, and the darkness where the boats are, broken (somewhat defiantly, to me) by those party lights. Yet there still seems to be no one around, though I’m not sure if I’m influenced by knowing the conditions at the time and not seeing a soul stirring anywhere while getting the shots. (Curiously, there’s a small dinghy moored to the sailboat that was drifting in the breeze/current, somewhat blurred in this pic, and in at least one of the other frames there’s a faint indication that there was someone in it, but I couldn’t begin to explain why.) I get this sense of foreboding from the horizon glow, with a bit of denial coming from the party lights. In the other shots without the horizon visible, there’s instead a sense of post-festivities, an island of warmth within the stillness of the marina itself.

So how did your impressions compare?

And now, to completely ruin the idea, I’ll tell you that this was shot from the bridge overpass of one of the major roads in the town, well-lit by streetlights, and nowhere near as serene as it appears here. I’m sure it eventually quieted down late at night, but it was hardly the kind of “listen to the water lap against the sides of the boat” conditions that you might have imagined.

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