Tastebuds are anxious

November 16, 2025November 16, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

I don’t have to tell you that today is Harvest The First Of The Citrus From The Greenhouse Day, because I’m sure you’re already deeply involved in this yourself. We’ve been watching the lemons and the Key limes developing, wondering how many would be ready for the holiday – it wasn’t a huge haul, certainly not the bulk of what’s out there, but it’s a nice start.

The two Key lime (Citrus × aurantiifolia) trees are slowly turning, most of them not quite there yet:

Key limes Citrus × aurantiifolia developing on tree in greenhouse
I have to say, these trees have been trying to outdo themselves, and you can see here the new flower buds right alongside fruits that aren’t quite ripe yet – Key limes turn a bit yellowish when they’re ready, and pop free easily from the branch. We have dozens that are on their way.

The two lemon trees, however, are rather disparate, and don’t ask me for a species because they were unidentified when we got them and I haven’t been able to pin it down yet. [EDIT: They are likely Meyer lemons, Citrus × meyeri – seems to be a good match.] One spent the summer too close to the outside of the greenhouse when we had the heat wave, we think, and lost many of its leaves right when it should have been developing the fruit, so only one branch has lemons and they’re developing slowly.

The other, though…

cluster of lemons on single branch on tree in greenhouse
The other produced so many lemons that it cannot actually bear the weight of them and is drooping like a weeping willow – nonetheless, they’re all healthy-looking and just before peak ripeness. I was tugging, and most of them aren’t letting go easily, so we’ll let them develop a little longer yet.

large clusters of lemons on tree in greenhouse, with branches propped up on crates for support
Seriously, a few of the branches had to be supported on a plastic crate because we’re afraid they’ll simply rip off on their own. This one always seems to do this, and right after the harvest I intend to trim the branches shorter and hopefully get it to grow a bit thicker and heftier.

So right now, the lemon harvest was sparse, though we have no recipes yet picked out for them so no rush, really.

bowl of freshly picked lemons
The Key limes have a couple of different recipes waiting though, and probably more with a little poking around on the webbernets, so I set about prepping today’s harvest to have ready – they’re not enough for more than one recipe, if that, but we can freeze the juice and zest in preparation rather than having them dry out while we wait for enough to ripen.

collection of Key limes Citrus × aurantiifolia being zested
Key limes aren’t big at all, and I suspect the heatwave kept these a little smaller, but they’re otherwise fine, so I started off getting the zest from them all and producing hand cramps – have to suffer for your art, after all.

collection of zested Key limes Citrus × aurantiifolia now being juiced
Then the juicing, a bit easier. I’ve tried those specialty juice presses you find in housewares stores and I’m unimpressed – the old-fashioned juicers work best, and make it easier to snag out the seeds as you go (of which all of these trees produce in abundance, the lemons especially.)

harvest of Key lime Citrus × aurantiifolia zest and juice in ice cube tray for freezing
And then ready for the freezer. This little silicone tray has ‘cubes’ in roughly one teaspoon sizes, so easy enough to measure for a recipe. The zest is frozen with water so it won’t dry out in the freezer, though we’ll probably bag these one they’re solid anyway.

Now, what to do first: the standard Key lime pie, or a Key lime pound cake? Decisions, decisions…

Another night, another… what?

November 16, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

view of northern sky at night with no trace of auroral activity
This is just to let you know that not only is the Leonids meteor shower expected to peak tonight after midnight, but there’s a chance that the aurora borealis will make another appearance, and with a dark moon (actually, it doesn’t matter how bright it is, because it’s riding too close to the sun right now and thus wont be seen most of the night,) the conditions are halfway decent astronomically – all that remains is what local conditions are like.

The pic above is from two nights ago, the night after getting the barest hint of the aurora, and it shows not even that – just some very thin clouds right down near the horizon. I was out for about an hour and did several different exposures in several different directions, and got nothing very exciting at all. I did make another attempt at star trails, though:

15-minute time exposure of night sky looking north proscribing arcs around Polaris
The exposure was set a bit better this time, but there’s still a lot of residual light in the sky, probably courtesy of the high humidity that we virtually always have here. Fifteen minute exposure, and not one Leonid elected to cross the frame. I mean, c’mon…

I tweaked the image afterward in GIMP for slightly better color and much better contrast, but yeah, it’s ‘shopped:

15-minute time exposure of night sky looking north proscribing arcs around Polaris, with contrast and color adjustments done digitally
Now, the very faint shadow at lower left is more visible, and this is likely my head. The deal was, I was on the side of a lonely road, but my framing was fairly low and so oncoming car headlights could actually illuminate the lens even when the road wasn’t in the frame. To fix this, I positioned myself between the camera and the single oncoming car so the camera remained in my shadow, but I think I got just a little too close.

[To do this, by the way, you have to face the camera and watch the shadow carefully, because as the car tracks past your shadow will pivot around and may expose the camera again, unless you compensate by shifting with it.]

Now, also while out there, some nearby canids decided to have an argument, and I quickly started recording video just to capture the audio, though this is only with the on-camera mic:

Serenade at night

You’ll notice that everything is in the same general pitch, so unless there’s a puppy mill someplace out there (which I certainly won’t rule out in rural North Carolina,) I’d say I caught a dispute among a pack or two of coyotes (Canis latrans.) You can go here and listen to the second track around the 30 second mark to compare, but it’s damn close at least.

Anyway, feel free to try your luck with both the aurora and the Leonids – I’ll likely be out there for at least a little while. One of these days…

Estate Find XLVI.V

November 15, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

This one had been in the lineup for this week’s Estate Find until the beaver bumped it, but I still have the pics sitting here, so…

Looked out the back window the other day, around mid-afternoon, and noticed that we had a lurker out there.

red-shouldered hawk Buteo lineatus sitting in bald cypress
This is a red-shouldered hawk (Buteo lineatus,) almost certainly one of the ones that had been regularly hunting in the front yard much earlier this year – for convenience’s sake, I’m going to consider this one the female based on previous observations. She was sitting in roughly the middle of the yard, which gave here a good line of sight (and flight) down to the pond edge where the wood ducks congregate at feeding times. This was not either feeding time, sitting well between, and the wood ducks were nowhere to be seen, but it was still a suspicious perch.

red-shouldered hawk Buteo lineatus perched in bald cypress unconcerned with photographer
I crept out carefully so as not to spook her before I got a few frames, but it was wasted effort, since she didn’t appear to have the faintest concern over my presence. It was bit of a chilly day, not really that bad, but she appears to be coping with the cold, which is interesting because I’ve seen the pair perched in the same general locale when the temperatures were well below freezing.

Perhaps a week earlier, I’d gone out through the garage and spooked her from the front lawn, where she flew to her typical perch on the streetlight at the end of the driveway, but that was how we knew the pair seemed to be returning to their old habits. Now we’re keeping an eye out, because while we fully understand the balance of nature thing and it’s not like there’s a scarcity of wood ducks, we’re still not keen on losing them to the hawks, especially not when we’re the ones coaxing them up onto the pond edge with corn.

red-shouldered hawk Buteo lineatus perched casually in bald cypress
By the way, this is a typical habit of red-shouldered hawks: they tend to find perches well within the canopy of the trees and on a branch close to the main trunk, limiting their visibility and profile against the sky or background. Red-tailed hawks, on the other hand, usually perch out in the open, highly visible, but over areas where rodents are more likely to appear, which is why you see them along the mowed verges of highways.

After several frames, I sent this one on her way with a few sharp clacks of two wood blocks together – there’s plenty of other food sources in the area, and she’ll probably be hunting the anoles in the front yard in the mornings anyway.

Estate Find XLVI

November 14, 2025November 14, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

Another two part one this week – we’ll start off slow.

While I had been seeing some news alerts that the aurora borealis might be visible in several northern states, I paid little heed to them since North Carolina, despite its name, is far from being considered a ‘northern’ state. Then The Girlfriend’s Sprog told me that we might actually be seeing a display here, and I made it a point to get out to a dark sky location with a decent-ish view to the north – which is harder in this area than I imagined. I did numerous time exposures aimed north at various exposure settings, as well as some not aimed north, for the sake of it. And while chimping at the resulting exposures gave an indication that some light was there on the horizon, I wasn’t convinced that this was any evidence of the aurora itself.

However, the following day I saw some photos from others at this same latitude that had a better view north and did indeed capture a nice pink glow, so it’s safe to say that this is what produced the light here. Certainly not a stunning (or even interesting) display, but evidence that it can be seen at extreme times all the way down here.

I could easily have credited this to light pollution from nearby sources, though I’ve never seen it this hue and it was notably different from the glow in other directions. By naked eye, this color could not be made out at all, so not in any way a nice display.

But I did a 20-minute exposure for giggles, unfortunately with less-than-ideal settings that blew it out a bit, so I ended up tweaking the image in GIMP for a more fartistic version.

That was part one. Part two was captured last night down at the pond, when some uncommon noises attracted the attention of The Girlfriend and I.

The headlamp in tightly-focused spotlight mode is just barely adequate for video at short to moderate distances, provided I can keep it on the subject while also keeping the camera trained that way, which requires watching the LCD screen on the back which my personal focus range doesn’t want to permit easily – to be sure everything’s sharp, I usually end up using my inherent myopia and looking over top of my glasses at the screen, which naturally starts aiming the headlamp in the wrong direction. This is not a working solution.

The microphone, by the way, was the same Takstar SGC-598 used here, but damn it was picking up too much of the ambient noise – the cars weren’t half as close as they sound in the video. I should have gone with the Azden shotgun mic, but there wasn’t time to affix it to the video cage. The video light that I have (and did use for the latter clips when it decided to work again – don’t know why it balked initially) is an LED model with a broader view, ideal for macro work, but not focused for any distance. And yes, the video monitor seen at that link would help with focusing, but not with keeping the headlamp aimed correctly.

The beavers, meanwhile, were initially willing to ignore the bright lights and the occasional odd sounds coming from The Girlfriend and I, but eventually began to believe that this might not be kosher. It’s a shame that I wasn’t prepared for video right from the start, because on first finding one of them (which I believe might have been this year’s offspring,) I watched it stuff its head into a tangle of water reeds and plow around after something in there, venting a little grunt/whimper of frustration – this helped support the idea of it being young, since I’ve never heard the adults make any noise save for some teeth chattering as a warning if approached too close.

But, yeah, I have some improvements to make if I intend to pursue these kind of subjects with video. We’ll see how that goes…

You can always try

November 13, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

night time exposure view of Orion with plane passing through
This is just to give you adequate notice that the Leonids meteor shower is expected to peak the evening/morning of the 16^th/17^th, just a few nights away. While it is not forecast to be a significant one this time around, it has a tendency to be a decent display, so go for it.

Just to let you know, pictured is not Leo, but Orion, and not a meteor, but a plane of course. I have no worthwhile pics of a Leonid meteor, or indeed any, and not from being lazy. But we needed something here to capture your attention, and I just got this shot recently. Rest assured, if I get a decent image of a meteor, you will not only know about it, but I will be celebrating this long overdue event, a cake and a DJ and possibly a trained elephant. Don’t get me started…

You don’t say?

November 13, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

collection of over sixteen Canada geese Branta canadensis on edge of backyard pond
Last Friday, we featured a video of the return of the Canada geese (Branta canadensis) to the pond after their curious disappearance months previously; the count was always either six or eight geese at any given time. A few days after that, I was looking out the bedroom window just after waking up in the morning to see nothing out there, until a flash of movement through the trees drew my attention, and a small flock of four or five came in to land further up by Turtle Island, some on the water and some actually on shore.

By the time I got downstairs, however, the numbers had increased significantly. Being blocked by various cypress trunks made it hard to be precise, but I dependably got at least fourteen. After feeding the cats, I took a bucket of corn down to the water’s edge – we won’t do this while the ducks are present because they’ll scatter and we’d rather not scare them off too often, but the geese are relatively complacent, just giving us a little distance. At that time, I got a count of nineteen, twice, which is a big jump in the number, literally overnight.

Obviously, the word was getting out that this was a safe place with food – but that got me to thinking, since no words were getting out at all. How, exactly, was this idea being communicated? And forgive me, because from this point on it’s only going to be idle and unedumacated speculation.

We’re oriented towards sound/speech/vocalization, so the first direction we tend to turn is thinking that the honks that the geese use from time to time are a method, and to be sure, there are subtle variations that can be found in the pitch and spacing and volume. I am reminded of our (human) neighbors in central New York, when one of their sons was now old enough to obtain his hunting license. They grew corn to feed their dairy cows, and the geese often used these fields after the harvest because it was a safe stopover and always had some leftover cobs available to snack upon. I could see the neighbor out there on the edge of the treeline, waiting for the geese to arrive, and when a flock was cruising in low, he gave forth with his goose call – only, he was imitating an alarm cadence, and the geese veered off and never landed. It’s not simply the sounds they make that matter.

So perhaps the geese now visiting our ponds have honked out the charms of their destination, but from experience, I can tell you that honking isn’t used that often at all, more often in flight and in gathering the flock together as one for takeoff. Since we’ve had at least two different groups visiting, this doesn’t seem to be a collective flock circumstance (especially when a flight can be as few as four or five geese or as many as several dozen, which could not be entertained on our little pond.) Moreover, for three days or more we had no more than eight, and then suddenly that number better than doubled. And to add to that, quite a few of them don’t fly in at all, but simply swim through the channel from The Bayou (which is much larger and even better protected, at least from a gooseley standpoint, because no one has access to the shoreline at all.)

Nonverbal cues are often far more prevalent in the animal kingdom, and indeed, we use them a lot more than we give credit for ourselves. We (perhaps just ‘I’) might ask what kind of behavior clues the others in? Is it that the initial group tended to leave some common meeting ground together to come up to our pond, or maybe how long they stayed away? Did they show little interest in food when they returned, suggesting that they’d been eating well while they were gone?

There’s a possibility that it’s a time of day thing, too – maybe geese have certain times that they seek food, and leaving for another spot at these times was indicative? Morning, of course, is prime feeding time for just about any diurnal animal, so suddenly heading out to another locale at that time perhaps says all that it needs to.

I’ve watched several movements that are repeated, from both the geese and the wood ducks, and they certainly seem to mean certain things though I have yet to hash out a decent ‘vocabulary,’ and of course I’m not able to see them at all when they’re about to leave The Bayou (or anyplace else) to come up to the main pond here. There may be some subtle communications of that nature, head bobs or shakes, flapping just before heading out, things like that. I’ve seen one goose always on lookout when anyone is feeding, same with the mallards, and this might be carried to the wood ducks too but they’re in such a frenzy when they finally do come up on shore and I’ve never seen one that’s committed to being the lookout, though often there’s one seeming to temporarily fulfill that duty. With the geese it’s more obvious, as are their warnings once we got too close; this really applied to the previous collection visiting, who were semi-habituated to us, while these are far more wary and maintain a certain distance out on the water when we’re nearby.

I have no conclusion to offer, just trying to hash out something that’s outside of our normal perspective, and offering perhaps a little insight into what any animal observer should try to pay attention to. Decent and definitive answers likely only come from dozens to hundreds of hours observing, and I’m certainly not at that level yet with any individual species (I tend to treat it as a buffet of many species and not concentrate on any one, which stretches things out a hell of a lot longer.) Naturally, anyone that has greater info is welcome to jump in and tell me where I’m all wet.

six Canada geese Branta canadensis cruising past in backyard pond

Life in the wild

November 11, 2025November 10, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

To say that the property is littered with lizards is understating things to a serious degree, since they can be seen nearly everywhere when the day is warm enough and the sun is out, and I’m used to seeing them scampering away around the edges of the house, shed, and greenhouse – in fact, I have to regularly check the shed to see who’s gotten locked inside because, if the door is open for longer than ten seconds, they’re compelled to go in there. We even leave the garage door cracked at the bottom now so they can escape from their forays into there.

So why I specifically noticed this Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis) as it sat on the ramp into the shed, I can’t say, but I thought something looked odd. I managed to capture it easily, too easily, and then had to find something to put it into since they’re sneaky little cusses and can easily slip between fingers. Eventually I got it into the bathroom ‘studio,’ but it resolutely refused to stay in the dish setting and flew out of it instantly, twice, and so I decided to take it outside to the coral bark Japanese maple and use that as a setting. Thankfully, the anole stayed put and I could get some detail shots.

Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis with drastic eye issues
This is about what I was first seeing, the lizard only half of adult size so the head a mere 10mm in length, and I couldn’t tell if that black ball was a seed or debris simply adhering to the head, or some serious issue; it turned out to be the latter.

Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis with left eye swollen out of socket and black
That’s either the eye itself, or some growth thereon, but either way I’d say there’s no going back from that. Checking the other side wasn’t a lot better.

Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis with infected ad misshapen left eye and right eye entirely missing
The right socket was entirely empty so the anole was completely blind, making its mad dashes out of the dish that I was using as a photographic setting rather surprising – at least it paused on the leaves of the tree and remained there as long as I didn’t disturb it.

I seem to recall reading about something infecting wild reptiles, but can’t remember exactly what and can’t find it now. I know I’ve come across both a green treefrog that was missing its eyes, as well as a yellow-bellied slider back in the pond near the old place:

yellow-bellied slider Trachemys scripta scripta missing both eyes
Now, I can’t vouch for how well a slider can cope with not being able to see, since they’re herbivorous and mainly feed on subsurface plants – can they do that by smell or feel? I honestly don’t know. But anoles are sight feeders, pouncing on insects in a lightning fast manner, and lacking sight, this one’s simply going to starve.

blind Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis dangling from Japanese maple by its hind legs, unsure of how to flee.
It started to move out of easy sight behind some leaves, but my gentle nudge caused it to start to flee, stopping only when it was finding no purchase for its front legs, and it remained there, unsure of what danger was present. This isn’t precarious for them – they can sleep like this, and climb vertical and quite smooth surfaces like the plastic sides of the greenhouse, so I left it alone, but then after confirming its condition by examining the photos that I’d gotten in detail, I gathered it up again. It had dropped to the grass beneath and was making its way along in short dashes, easy enough to capture again.

Knowing that it would only deteriorate from here, I started the car and flooded with container with car exhaust gases, then sealed it tight overnight so the carbon monoxide could do its work. It was that, or slice its head off with a sharp knife, so I opted for the cleaner and more peaceful method, not to mention that I couldn’t count on the lizard to hold still enough and I’d probably end up slicing off a fingertip instead.

A batch of autumnal monochroma

November 10, 2025November 10, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

“Wait, monochrome?” you say, “As in, black and white? Al, you fucking moron, fall is the time to exploit the colors, not eliminate them entirely. What, are you trying to be avant-garde or poetically ironic or something equally spastic?”

Which hurts, I admit it, even when I wrote it myself. But I saw the possibilities of some of these, which worked better than most of what I’ve shot in the past several months for converting, so here we are. Now try to be nice.

time exposure of backyard by moonlight, reduced to only red channel monochrome
By converting this one, it almost says “moonlight” better than the original. This is channel clipping again, just the Red channel. If you haven’t tried this, you should – some pics just look blasé, while others pop up with something entirely new.

fraternal potter wasp Eumenes fraternus on chrysanthemum blossom, reduced to only Blue channel
This one wasn’t part of the original lineup, but as I was doing these, I went back through recent pics for some candidates. Most of them didn’t work that well, but this one converted nicely, using only the Blue channel this time; most times Blue is the least interesting, often grainy, but it brought out the mauve chrysanthemum blossom well. The fraternal potter wasp (Eumenes fraternus) was already monochrome anyway.

An insert here, two that have been sitting in my folder for nearly a year – I just never posted them. But this is a view of The Bayou in winter, taken from the best vantage that I could reach by foot (so far, anyway):

view of The Bayou in winter, reduced to only the Blue channel
Just the Blue channel again. I could have tweaked contrast to improve this one, but there was a reason that I didn’t, which is, this is the full color version:

view of The Bayou during winter, nearly monochrome by itself
The cypress had all shed their needles, and the Spanish moss never has much color anyway, and facing south (my only choice) made the sky more washed out. In fact, I think it had more color than it might have because that’s ice you’re seeing, reflecting the sky color even better. What I should do is convert the two images into an animated gif (pronounced, “JREY-skayl“) that slowly morphs between the two, and say nothing about it, just to make people think their vision is going wonky.

Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis overexposed, converted to greyscale
This one, from October’s month-end abstracts, is simply a conversion to greyscale – I tried channel clipping, but each of them left something to be desired. I like how the eye almost produces a pure black and thus suggests the exposure was close to proper anyway, while the rest is a light pencil sketch. Very avant-garde.

backlit bald cypress needles reduced to only the Green channel
The Green channel this time. Funny thing about this one: I had an original cropping for the color version all set to go, but then when I converted to greyscale, I realized it looked better with a slightly different crop – and so did the color version, so that’s what I ended up using. Hilarious, right?

scattered leaves on surface of water with high contrast by reflection, combined Green and Blue channel greyscale
I remarked on the high contrast of this one despite the low contrast lighting conditions, and this is what prompted the monochrome experiments in the first place. This is one of those minor refinements, in that it’s a combination of the Green and Blue channels, making the Green (which sits ‘above’ the Blue) transparent to a degree – either one by themselves wasn’t quite right. Now it’s even more surreal and seems far more like elaborate digital editing, which might work against it standing alone – we know what the color version looks like, so we know it’s just a trick of the light and surface tension, but without that it may seem too artificial. Still, I like the eye-bending aspect of it.

And finally,

dew-covered Carolina anole closeup reduced to only Blue channel monochrome
I did this one some time back, soon after the original posted, but had nothing else to go with it, and just remembered it now. For saying that the Blue channel is often a poor choice, here it is again – we’ve actually had more of these in this batch than the other channels, so maybe don’t listen to me. I know, “Way ahead of you, Al,” shut up. But seriously, go do your own experiments, see what you produce – it’s healthy and appealing to the appropriate sex, and how many things can claim that nowadays?

Comparing the mics

November 10, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

Last night we had a thunderstorm roll through with some halfway decent thunder production, and I grabbed the two wildlife microphones to do some recording and comparisons. This turned out to be a great test subject, because it demonstrated just how different the methods captured sound.

The first microphone is the newest addition, though I’ve had the main part for a while: a Sony ECM-44B lavalier mic, but fitted to a 3D-printed parabolic dish to focus and magnify sound (I’ve reprinted it since that post, so it’s slightly improved now.) Initial tests with this showed that it was excellent at being able to pinpoint a sound source by the changes in volume as it reached the focal direction. But the smaller the parabolic dish is, the more low-frequency sounds it fails to capture; ideally, it should be in the realm of a meter across, but that’s unwieldy in just about any application, and commercial designs seem to fall a little less than a half-meter. Mine, however, is 26cm across the widest section, limited by the size of the printer bed.

The second microphone has been in use for a while now, an Azden SGM-2X unidirectional ‘shotgun’ mic intended for exactly these kind of uses, fitted with only a ‘dead cat’ wind guard. Shotgun mics are really slick in how they reduce off-axis sounds, and I don’t want to go into it here but encourage you to look it up if you’re unfamiliar with it, because it’s great.

Both mics have their own power source, a single AA battery, and both were feeding into an Olympus VN-8100PC digital audio recorder. Both were also pointed in the same general direction from the same location on the front step, about 30° upwards over the tops of the nearby trees where I could see the flashes and occasional lightning bolt, and by this time it was raining steadily, as can be heard. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do a direct side-by-side comparison since I only had the one recorder, so I could only pick thunder examples that seemed roughly the same, so precise it’s not. That said, the audio recordings showed a drastic difference in tone.

First, the parabolic dish mic:

Parabolic dish mic test

I had amplified this one slightly to get the ambient rain sound in the same general realm for both recordings, so the thunder could be more directly compared, and I let the recording run until I could no longer make out the echoes of the thunder.

Followed by the shotgun mic test:

Shotgun mic test

That’s a world of difference – the parabolic dish really doesn’t capture the lower registers well at all, though I think the shotgun mic is both optimized for them and has more of a built-in pre-amplifier. It also has a ‘low pass filter,’ which can reduce much of the very low frequencies/longer wavelengths, since a lot of ambient noise falls into this category. However, I was not using this setting since I wanted to see how low it captured.

Another example from the shotgun mic, this time of the loudest thunder that I heard while out there. Listen carefully, because you’ll hear the rain vanish for a few moments:

Thunder through shotgun mic

I actually heard the rain seem to stop through the monitoring headphones, amusing because I was standing right there and knew that it hadn’t, and I was a little concerned that the audio had issues. But what I suspect now is the Olympus recorder has an auto-levels setting and it quashed the volume as it began to creep too high, resulting in the quieter rain dropping off.

I also have to mention that I stepped out into the rain with the parabolic dish, and this is not recommended: the thin plastic of the dish picks up the raindrops hitting it all too well, producing a tinny but distinct tapping sound, close to the sound of rain on tight sheet plastic (which I guess it is.) Meanwhile, the dead cat on the shotgun mic prevents nearly all noise from rain hitting the mic, though you can still here faint taps when it hits the mic body outside of the wind guard. And both, of course, need to be handled gently with as few hand movements as possible, since these transmit through the bodies and come out quite distinctly in the recordings.

But I think the answer is clear, and I’ll be staying with the shotgun mic for audio and video recording, though I intend to do some tests with the wood ducks, notably much higher in pitch, to see if the parabolic mic amplifies those better. I think it’s likely that the parabolic will be used mostly to locate subjects with precision, because it is good at that, while the useful recording will be with the shotgun mic.

[I just have to add that I have a lightning tracking app on my smutphone, and I purposefully changed the alert tone to an actual recording of thunder that I’d made some years ago – which went off while I was listening to the audio of this very post in draft form. Nice little surround-sound effect…]

Next batch of autumnal chroma

November 9, 2025November 8, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

“Autumnal” – that’s where Radar O’Reilly is from, isn’t it?

Now on to part two of the recent fall color pics, most of them from right here at Walkabout Estates Plus, but a few from a downtown park. Like this one:

unidentified tree producing backlit autumn colors against blue sky
We actually saw this same tree last time – this is just a different spot on it. Making sure to use the backlighting, of course.

Canada geese Branta canadensis in backyard pond under variety of autumn colors
The light wasn’t the best, the colors not exactly popping, but convincing the geese to come back at a better time wasn’t going to happen – and I didn’t tweak this one for more saturation this time, either. Perhaps I should’ve…

I remarked earlier that the bald cypress in the immediate vicinity all had different schedules for changing. We have this one, hanging on in places:

bald cypress Taxodium distichum with green patches among the fall foliage change
… and then this one, completely given over to the orange side:

bald cypress Taxodium distichum completely turned to red-orange in fall
… and why there’s such a difference, I couldn’t say (without a decent contract.) It’s not like there’s any significant change in the conditions, or their distance from the pond. The best I can say is that, due to the open area of lawn (I use that word loosely) alongside this one, it receives more direct sunlight than the others which are clustered together, so maybe that’s it.

We can’t neglect our leaves on the water, a perennial favorite of mine:

variety of fallen leaves and duckweed on small channel of backyard pond
I made it a point to choose an angle that caught the sky and neighboring tree trunks reflecting from the water, brightening the frame considerably more than the typical dark water background. And selected that red leaf of course, but there aren’t enough maple trees in the area to provide sufficient fallen red leaves. We are at least trying to remedy that with the Japanese maples that we planted, but they’re all pretty small right now so their contributions are minimal – give it a few years. Though this one is trying:

changing colors of coral bark Japanese maple Acer palmatum 'Sango kaku' on same branch
Yes, we saw this same coral bark Japanese maple (Acer palmatum ‘Sango kaku’) before, and we’ll see some of the leaves again as a setting in a post or two, but I just like the way the colors change so abruptly on the same branch, and this tree isn’t even as tall as I am, having maybe a half dozen branches – we just got it this summer, and transplanted it less than a month ago. I may also be back to feature another, whose autumn changes made me wish I’d set up to do a time lapse.

yellow fall color of probable grapevine backlit against blue sky
C’mon, clear blue skies and backlit yellow leaves? You always have to try and make those work, even when you have a bare quartet of leaves to work with (I think this is a grape vine.)

Now, the same night that I did the ‘supermoon’ pics, I also did some time exposures by the light of said moon, and we’re going to see four of them, spaced out a little. This is the first:

time exposure of upper end of backyard pond under light of full moon
81 seconds, f5.6, ISO 800 – you can see some streaks from the stars, and they’re only as short as this because this was facing north-northeast. But I also did a variation of this perspective in daytime, albeit when the sun vanished behind a cloud:

wood duck nest box over backyard pond under fall colors
Another look at the wood duck nest box, patiently awaiting its use in early spring. See that trunk just barely peeking in the frame to the right? That’s the same as in the image above it, the most distinct one a little right of center – the moon wasn’t reaching the nest box at that time, unfortunately.

time exposure under full moon of backyard pond, fall colors, and Turtle Island
That’s Turtle Island in the center there, which appears to be in the center of a well-trimmed lawn because of the duckweed, but that is indeed water. This is about a dozen meters to the right of the previous night exposure, on the bend on the pond.

cluster of backlit possible maple leaves in fall colors
Another from the park – maple? Not sure. I selected the leaf at bottom as the focal point because it’s relatively unobscured and unshadowed, and made sure the focus brought out the veins.

Back to Walkabout Estates at night:

time exposure of stretch of back yard of Walkabout Estates Plus under moonlight
A similar shot, also under moonlight, was featured a month ago – last full moon, of course – but without much of the autumn coloration then. Once again, a little assistance was provided by the streelight that sits at the head of the driveway, coming in from the right around the end of the house. Though it’s not terribly visible, the thicket to the right is actually the foliage within The Puddle, a damp hollow that’s sometimes a tiny pond, and sometimes just squishy – it’s closer to pond right now.

Back to daylight.

branch of bald cypress Taxodium distichum showing fall color variations among the needles
Another branch of the bald cypress right in mid-change, caught as a shaft of sunlight worked its way through the canopy, making it glow. We’ll see another variation of this later on.

Back to moonlight.

time exposure of pond in backyard of Walkabout Estates Plus under light of full moon
We saw this same perspective a month ago, too, even with the same strand of Spanish moss, but without the schmuck this time. That’s Duck Island left of center, four different species of tree sprouting from one little tussock that isn’t even above water right now. I like how the moonlight rendered this (84 seconds, f5.6, ISO 800.)

And finally, back to daylight, kinda,

collection of fallen leaves on water surface with reflected hazy sky
I’ve done a variation of this long ago, with the fallen leaves and the reflection of bare branches in the water surrounding them, but this time it’s more mocking with full foliage in the reflection. While the light is distinctly low-contrast and the colors all quite muted, the image nevertheless has high contrast from the water reflecting the sky and the leaf shadows, with the surface tension rimming much of the detail in stark outlines – I like how this came out, half-unintentionally, and you’ll see a variant of it soon.

That clears out the autumn colors that I’d had in the folder, which is not to say that some more won’t be along, but this is the best showing that I’ve had in years, I think. Without making any special trips, either. One of these days, we’ll get a mountain trip timed right, though we’re now at least five hours from the mountains. Too late for it this year, but there’s still time to find a few more selections of foliage in this area, so we’ll see what transpires.

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