So for August, we’ll have two month-end abstracts, and you can pick your favorite. Both were from central New York, a day-and-a-half and about five meters apart – well, my shooting position at least. The osprey (Pandion haliaetus) above was cruising past in the distance after sunset, with the light low enough that the shutter speed was too slow, yet the lens
Category: Nature
Seriously, what?
I just realized that, a year ago, I posted a pic of a great blue heron seen from the underside as it perched in a tree above my head, and I had the image above sitting in the blog folder waiting on my chance to make a post, so I couldn’t let this go by. Is this the start of an annual routine? Well, I guess we’ll just have to see how often such a thing occurs…
This is instead a great
Storytime 35
One day four years back, I was checking out the neighborhood pond and noticed something slightly odd about a tree at the head of one portion of the trail it seemed to have some dry leaves adhering directly to the trunk, which of course is not where you typically see leaves hanging. Had it been anywhere else, I likely would have passed it by without even noticing,
A pattern I haven’t determined yet
Out last night poking around in the backyard, for the first time in days, I came across a green treefrog (Hyla cinerea) – gratifying, because I’ve been trying to convince them to hang around in the region, but curious nonetheless because I haven’t seen one here since early spring I thought the Copes grey treefrogs had pretty much taken over. I didn’t
Storytime 33
Today, we have a reminiscence of a reminiscence – or something like that. What you see here is “Silver Bridge” on the railroad spur that crosses Cayuga Lake, one of the Finger Lakes in central New York, which is where I grew up. Or passed my adolescence, anyway – we won’t discuss how little I’ve actually grown up. It’s known as Silver Bridge,
Just because, part 31
Another quickie, as threatened. Given that I found this itty-bitty treefrog sitting on the upper rim of the same rainbarrel that had produced a previous photo subject, I’m going to hazard a guess that it emerged from the same source, the rainbarrel itself,
Just because, part 30
I occasionally get the chance to snag a pic or two, but not a lot of time to write up anything at all about them, so I’ll present a couple of ‘Just because’ posts this week. In this case, it’s a cicada, of an unidentified species, that I found molting into final instar (reproducing adult phase) while attached to the tire of the car that I was working on.
Storytime 32
This week we have something commonly called a comb jelly, but more specifically called a ctenophore (silent ‘c,’) because it’s not a jellyfish and in fact pretty far removed from such – it’s in a phylum all its own. I found one by accident in Florida one time, because they’re so completely transparent that I didn’t even spot it when I was
Haven’t broken that cycle yet
You know when I mentioned earlier that not a lot of things were going right? Yeah, still at it.
We’ll start with a photo outing with Mr Bugg, intended to chase birds and the sunset, though I already suspected the sunset wouldn’t be too fascinating, since the sky was completely free of clouds. We had several good passes from vultures and osprey, but for reasons unknown, the autofocus on
July has to leaf
Okay, that was terrible, even for me, but it was still better than, “July has to fly,” which was my original choice. We are talking, of course, about the end-of-the-month abstract, something that started as a mere coincidence several years back and I’ve been continuing out of, um, something or other. If you were a professional blogger you’d understand.
Ignoring all that, this



















































