Send nutes

I’ve stalled on this video compilation for too long, especially since I have another waiting in the wings that now has far too many clips to add to it, but here it is, anyway: more of what goes on at the pond edge, mostly at night, but there are a couple day clips in there.

Now, I’m well aware that a video this length will cause a certain percentage of people to simply skip it, unable read more

Now and then


Well, it’s now “Then and then,” since I didn’t quite get things done while it was still World Turtle Day, but I got to recognize the holiday a little, anyway. The photos are all from WTD, which was yesterday now, though the video from a week ago. I did a patrol of the Estates while it wasn’t raining, but found nothing to do any closeups read more

Life on these Estates

Mostly trivia here, with a closing bit of amusement, but at least I’m posting some more. Now, if we could only get it to be something good

Despite the up-and-down nature of the temperatures, actually requiring us to move a few things back into the greenhouse, many of the plants around Walkabout Estates are kicking it this spring. The largest butterfly bush (Buddleja davidii,) read more

We all knew they were coming

… it was just a matter of time.


The first reappearance (after a long hiatus) of the wood ducklings (Aix sponsa) came just as we were running out the door, because of course. Then the barest of video clips that evening, before it rained for about 16 hours. Once it cleared, however, things picked up, and by this past Monday, we were seeing them just about every hour, cycling through.

A little read more

Nights in April

You can expect to find things like this, if you’re looking around. Two short clips, one from last night, one from, damn, ten days ago – I’d been hoping to get some more to go along with it, but there’s been no further sign as yet.

A note about the toads. This isn’t actually mating, since they do external fertilization: the female finds a body of water read more

Took long enough

So, this is the other video that I’ve been trying to finish up, the notorious one mentioned in previous posts. It did not help in the slightest that, before getting the chance to edit together the clips, I continued to add more to them.

But yeah, the discoveries on the property keep right on happening. It’s certainly not boring in any way. Well, at least not for us

You can see that read more

Estate Finds 56 & 57

A double for today, even though these were both found yesterday – the time to get the post together just wasn’t there, but part of this was because I insisted on fleshing it out a bit, which means, another video clip.

By the way, I kept mentioning getting to two videos, and have recently posted two. Only, the second one wasn’t one of those I was referring to, being a Tip Jar entry read more

One of them videos

I finally got around to completing one of the two videos that I had on the docket, but we have to lead into it a little.

The backstory: With the gout of warm weather a short while back, the various amphibians around the yard (among many other critters) leapt into action and were out making a dogawful racket some nights – as in, it was actually painful to listen to from short read more

Tip Jar 9: Curves, part 2

And now we get into the second aspect of using the ‘Curves’ function for image editing, and that’s color management. I’m being my usual long-winded self here, so bear with me – if you can’t handle the length, there are TikTok morons that you could probably relate to.

Something that I didn’t go into within the video is, what constitutes excessive editing, read more

Tip Jar 8: Curves, part 1

I’ve been meaning to get to this for a while, and finally tackled it this past week. Herewith, a tutorial on using the ‘Curves’ function in many image editing programs to adjust brightness and contrast within an image, selectively as needed.

As noted therein, this won’t work very well if your monitor is poorly calibrated for brightness, contrast, and gamma, so it’s recommended read more

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