Yep, once again, today is Free Thinkers Day, when you can go into your favorite home furnishings store and get a little statue of a naked constipated man at no charge! While supplies last, of course.
Okay, the Walkabout Fact-checkers (stop giggling) are informing me that this is not at all the case, or even the meaning of the holiday, and that it’s actually Freethinkers Day, so now I have to
With the weather being surprisingly warm and clear and a not-full moon shining down, I elected to traipse over to the neighborhood pond and try my luck spotting the beaver(s). This time I did not have The Girlfriend to wield a light for me so I could focus, since she’d gone to bed hours before, so I strapped a powerful flashlight to the lenshood of the Tamron 150-600 and did a quick test out
Late this morning I got alerted by a friend who lives on the neighborhood pond that there was a new visitor hanging out, and I wasted no time in getting over there. Thankfully, the visitor decided to stay put long enough.
This, of course, is a bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus,) and the first that I’ve seen there, though my friend has seen them in previous years.
I find it hard to believe this myself, but not only have I featured a skunk only once here on the blog, I think I have just one other set of images in my entire stock, from many years ago, of a juvenile that had been live-trapped.
For reasons unknown and completely perplexing, skunks are incredibly scarce in this area of North Carolina, and bear in mind that I used to work with both animal rescue
Going out onto the back porch the other night, I heard a significant racket coming from either just outside the back fence, or just inside it. While I always have a pocket flashlight on me, the view in that immediate direction is blocked by the greenhouse and the shed, so I had to creep down there, to be greeted by no fewer than eight white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus)
One of the things that we get to do here is recognize the unsung heroes of our world, the ones who by all rights should have a holiday of their own but have somehow been missed. And today, on the 75th anniversary of the first time he was laughed at in public, we review the contribution of Bumfester Chugtrollop, the inventor of the photographer’s vest.
First, we need a little history of the
There are probably going to be a lot of arthropod images showing up in this topic, because there is a much wider variety of species than anything else, and I was going to say “in this area” but I think that holds true around the world. I’ll mix it up as much as I can but, you know, nature of the beast…
And this one I’ve definitely only photographed once, because I think
Was out in the yard yesterday, trying to oxidize some old deck boards, and as things were smoldering I wandered around a little bit. On the wall right near the access door that has served as an anole hideyhole, I found this guy enjoying the sunlight.
Now, the temperature when I spotted this Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis) was roughly 12°c, but that was the absolute
It’s slow right now, with nothing to see, no reason to go out, and so on. About the best I can say is that the avocado trees (three of them, all started from pits) are absolutely delighted with the greenhouse and have been growing exuberantly therein. I almost wish I had done a time-lapse sequence of them…
But otherwise, there’s little to appear here, and so, I’m tackling
That our next entry has only been featured once is no particular surprise, since it was found during my couple of years in Florida and wasn’t common to see then. But while poking around in the Indian River Lagoon, occasionally I would spot a long narrow fish darting away, always a fleeting glimpse, and eventually I managed to get a couple of ‘ehhh’ images