On this date 59

Boy, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? But I noticed that I haven’t posted anything for December 1st in the past three years, and decided to rectify that. This was a good choice, because I’ve shot quite a few photos on December 1st, though mostly in two specific years, so I have plenty to work with.

We’ll start with 2008.


A read more

Last week’s birds

It seems only fitting (perhaps that’s not the right word) that we start off with something that is not birds.


Shooting sunrise on Jordan Lake last week, I did a quick silhouette with one of the tiny, unidentified trees/bushes that appear sporadically out into the water a short ways (actually, this may be a buttonbush, Cephalanthus occidentalis.) Not the most prepossessing read more

Not food and not motherhood

I actually got a few photos in today – nothing exciting, nothing even noteworthy, except that I wasn’t even trying today was yard work and gardening day, and I was mostly planting things. But as a nature and wildlife blog, this post isn’t going to the Favorites page, mine or anyone else’s, and the best I can say for it is that it isn’t food related, read more

No Boy Scout

There’s (at least) two messages within that title, which you know makes me happy…

So, in going back through the folders in search of more subjects for the Profiles of Nature posts, I found some of those frames for which I’d said, “I need to write about that,” and then promptly filed them and forgot about it – this is a semi-regular occurrence. Lucky for all of read more

More random stuff from the pond


Just a handful of photos, other stuff that I collected on the same days that I was shooting the great egret and the turtles. More or less, anyway – I actually returned to capture the above shot of newborn six-spotted fishing spiders (Dolomedes triton) because I didn’t have the macro flash rig along when I first spotted them. Unfortunately, the nice composition read more

The golden hour


You know, poetic license is all well and good, but you’d think photographers could be more specific and descriptive. The periods where the sun is low on the horizon are usually called the “golden hours,” but the colors are often not just gold, and spend more time in the various orange hues than yellow or gold. We could have the amber minutes, and the saffron, the read more

Finger Lakes: The animals

I have a serious number of images from my trip up to the area where I grew up, which is the Finger Lakes region of central New York, but haven’t had a lot of time to write anything up about them, so I decided to split the posts into two and make them relatively brief. For me, anyway – this might mean upwards of five-thousand words or so, but you should already know that this is what read more

So what did 2017 hold?

Of course, with the replacement of a small stack of bound pages with kitten pictures on our walls and the practice of crossing out the incorrect date on our checks (neither of which actually occurs anymore,) it is time to examine the previous twelve months and try to figure out what went wrong, just so we can feel better about what the next twelve months might hold. And since I’m read more

Just because, part 18

I came across this one while sorting images, and decided to put it up large, mostly because the dragonfly and the berries all fell so well into the same plane of focus and thus had sharp details.


I just tried for half an hour to identify those berries, with no luck, but the dragonfly is a blue dasher (Pachydiplax longipennis.) However, it wasn’t until I was just about read more

No record this year

Last year, I was making it a point to post more than I had any year earlier, and did indeed reach that mark, just a few days past this date last year. It is safe to say that I won’t be setting any records this year, since with this one I am 44 posts away, and I don’t see me knocking out, like, three posts a day from here on.

The move to a new house had a lot to do with this, as did the read more

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