Estate Find XLVI.V

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.


This is a red-shouldered hawk (Buteo lineatus,) almost certainly one of the ones that had been regularly hunting in the front read more

Estate Find XLVI

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 read more

You can always try


This is just to give you adequate notice that the Leonids meteor shower is expected to peak the evening/morning of the 16th/17th, 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 read more

You don’t say?


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 read more

Life in the wild

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 read more

A batch of autumnal monochroma

“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 read more

Next batch of autumnal chroma

“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:


We actually saw this same tree last time – this is just a different spot on it. Making sure to use the backlighting, of course.


The read more

I am not to blame

Listen – we haven’t seen a single bunny rabbit in the yard since we moved here. There have been a handful of fawns, and you’ve seen them all. No lambs, no kittens, certainly no red pandas or meerkats or bushbabies or quokkas. Assuredly, if there were, I’d be photographing them, but I can only snag what I see, and the cute ones are few and far between. It’s read more

First batch of autumnal chroma

Boy, do we have a gout of photos to get through now! They’re going to be spaced out a bit, so perhaps they’ll last the week, but a few days at the least. And that still doesn’t count some (a lot of) video clips to edit together. So let’s get started.

This year we have a decent selection of fall colors, almost all of them local – and this was after I was concerned that read more

Estate Find XLV

We hope you’ll join us in welcoming back our old friends – unless of course they’re not actually our old friends, in which case we welcome some new ones, even when they’re not as friendly.

As I said in the video, the Canada geese (Branta canadensis) have been missing from the environs since May – the last time they appeared was to read more

1 5 6 7 8 9 240