As if most of my posts aren’t the exact same thing…
So, two purposes for this one. The first is a reminder that the Draconids meteor shower is going on right now and expected to peak tomorrow night, actually around 19:00 UTC on October 8th, which is 15:00 EDT, or 3 PM Eastern (because we’re somehow still observing this asinine clock-changing bullshit.) So okay, in the Americas, we probably won’t see much at peak unless we’re really lucky and one of those brilliant daytime fireballs occurs, but we can still be out when it gets dark enough and may see something. Will I personally get the chance? Probably not, but we’ll see.
The other purpose is to dump a few pics that won’t otherwise fit into a topic. The other day I went out to Goose Creek State Park to see if I could find anything, and the answer was, “Barely.” Really not much going on at that time, except for a handful of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) that viewed me with apparent confusion, unsure whether they should alert the authorities or not. One flipped me off with its tail as I attempted to get some captivating images.
That nose came up really distinctly, like a gorilla offering a two handfuls of vanilla ice cream. Or is that just me?
When I got to the more scenic areas, the cloud cover was seriously rolling in and the light levels and color went to hell, so I was forced to skip any landscape shots. But I stumbled across an odd tableau of grasshoppers along one of the boardwalks.
It’s unusual to find a grasshopper that won’t leap away as you draw close, and quite rare to find a trio of them clustered together like this. I suspect that the larger one is a female, and the two smaller ones are courting males, but that’s just a guess. I also did a quick search to try and determine what species these were, but couldn’t pin it down from the photos that I got, all from this perspective. Possibly an obscure bird grasshopper, but that’s as close as I came. The sizes seem right at least.
But yeah, not a great day for activity at the park. I’d snagged this one before I left home, though:
There’s six of them here, and they all appear to be yellow-bellied sliders (Trachemys scripta scripta.) As busy as Turtle Island was in the winter and early spring, the turtles stopped using it from late spring throughout the summer, though they’re back now. My guess is that, between the warmer water temperatures and the thicker foliage obscuring the sun more, the turtles saw no reason to be basking on the island, and were rarely found even on the logs that were receiving regular sunlight. But as the overnight temperatures dropped (and thus the water temperature as well,) they found that a good sunning session was welcome. There had been even more of them, but a few of them dropped off the island at my approach. We’ll see if we can top last winter’s record of nineteen on this little tussock.
That’s it for now; putting these up since I won’t have the video done too soon due to time constraints. It’ll get here.