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. It’s safe to say that it won’t hang around, since the pond is less than 300 meters long by 100 wide, so a bit small for an eagle to feel comfortable with, not to mention frequented by people with dogs. It was likely just checking out the fish activity while exploring the area.
I was lucky in that it was winter and thus the foliage was gone from most of the trees, but I could never manage a perfectly clear angle without small intervening branches. My shooting distance for these two images was probably about 80 meters, so this is significantly cropped, but sharp enough at least.
The eagle moved to another tree in a bit better concealment, and as I was circling around to get a clear vantage, it decided to move on. I feel pretty comfortable that I wasn’t the cause of this since I wasn’t anywhere near as close as two joggers that passed, multiple times, so I think the eagle was just ready to head out.
I watched to see if it was going to choose another tree nearby, but no, it disappeared over the treeline in the middle distance, so I continued around the pond because I hadn’t been there in a while.
A great blue heron (Ardea herodias herodias) appeared from someplace and cruised down to the pond’s edge, then chose another spot; as it was coming in to land, it made an abrupt turn and dove into the shallows, a lot like a seagull, and stood up with a capture – perhaps lucky that it did not do this in front of the eagle, a species notorious for stealing fish from others.
The heron immediately headed towards shore as I advanced around the pond trying for a better view, but after passing some intervening bushes, I could no longer see the heron. Eventually, with the long lens I spied it hiding behind some trees right on the shore, but this meant that I had some distance to cover before I’d get a clear view again. And once I had, I found that the heron had finished its meal already.
This isn’t surprising, because herons swallow their meals whole like most birds; what I chiefly missed was it dislodging the fish from its stab-through capture to realign it head-first so it could be swallowed, almost certainly why the heron climbed onto shore in the first place: the dislodged fish wouldn’t be able to escape into the water. So I settled for the profile.
Also evident on the pond were a few double-crested cormorants (Nannopterum auritum,) initially perched on the old pilings but eventually setting out for their own meals.
The brown neck denotes a female, but I’m not absolutely sure, given the light conditions, that the one on the right is a male – they’re typically overall black, or at least dark-grey, so this might just be a color variation in another female. I’ve seen multiple females hanging out together quite often, and never distinct evidence of a mated pair doing so, so I commit to nothing. But I also think I missed one of them surfacing with a fish, again because of bushes blocking a clear shot (you see the pics from when I finally get a nice view – I don’t bother illustrating the conditions.) I admit that I should have been checking out the pond more, but also admit that it’s been damn cold for the past week or so and I likely would have seen nothing anyway – today got a lot warmer and will continue to do so for another couple of days.
Plus, I have another reason to check things out, but in this case, it’ll be overnight:
That’s distinct evidence that, after having disappeared last year, at least one beaver is back in the area, and I spotted several different instances in multiple locations – more than a night’s worth of activity, is what I’m saying. Probably won’t see anything by daylight until early spring at the earliest, so I’ll have to resort to flash stalking again, see what turns up. You’ll find it here if I’m successful.
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 and wildlife rehabilitation, as well as advising about wildlife encounters. Throughout all of that, to say nothing about being a photographer and wanting to get more images of them, the actual contacts that I’ve had were just barely enough to maintain that they existed and little more. There was one section of the whole region where I suspected they might be, if not prevalent, at least present in small numbers, and that was from smelling their evidence there perhaps three times in over a decade.
This image of a (likely) striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis) was therefore taken in Ohio, in the suburban front yard of friends of mine, and my exposure to one had been so many years previous that I was peering at this black animal for too long, trying to determine what it was – granted, it was night and the skunk hadn’t yet revealed the white spot on its head, but still. I was nonetheless delighted, knowing that skunks are actually pretty mellow and require a fair provocation before they’ll let loose with their defensive spray.
Twice while up in New York a few years ago I found skunks, both during the day, yet neither time able to snag a photo. One had emerged from deep weeds right alongside the car while I was stopped in a wildlife refuge, but I was unable to focus in time before it realized I was there and disappeared back into the weeds, never to be seen again – it would have been a great portrait, too. Three decades back when I lived there and used to go out for walks on the road at night, I encountered them a few times with never any defensive response; one realized that I was following it down the road and turned to face me quite deliberately, alert but not yet threatened, and continued on its way once I’d held still for a few moments. You gotta admire that kind of panache…
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) all bucks with notable racks of antlers, one rack appearing to be a half-meter tall alone. Getting any photos of this in the darkness would have required not just getting the camera, but loading the Vivitar 285 flash with batteries and getting the headlamp just for focusing, and I didn’t think they’d hang around for that. I probably should have chanced it, because as I went across the backyard to the other side of the house, I was met with another, nowhere near as impressive in the antler department, but watching me curiously from about five meters away, while I could see two more at the edge of the front yard. Life is full of regrets.
Just tonight, however, I heard much the same noises, and this time before even venturing out I grabbed the camera, flash, and headlamp. They were farther off the back of the property this time and there appeared to be only three of them, but I managed a few frames before they wandered off away from me and my weird noises and lights. Only one was good enough to illustrate, at least:
Certainly could have been better, but here’s the deal: all focusing has to be done manually using the beam of the headlamp, and things are darker in the viewfinder, so the only thing that can be used is the reflection of the eyes – when they’re looking at the camera. That’s one little dot of light, provided I can keep the headlamp aimed at them while framing, which the large flash unit wants to block, so the headlamp has to be shifted off to the side, cockeyed on my head, where it wants to aim elsewhere. If I did more of this, I’d rig up something to hold the light on the flash unit, but since this occurs about once a year or so, I’m not inclined to put in the crafting effort.
By the way, the racket that I’d heard both times, reminiscent of someone clattering a load of branches, comes from the bucks marking territory by scraping their antlers along the trunks of trees, and I suspect the sound serves as well as the markings or the scent. Though why in the first instance there were so many bucks all together without a doe in sight, I cannot say – I do at least think there was one doe among the three tonight.
But yeah, if I was inclined to brave the cold for a chance at a few frames, I’ve got a good area to set up a blind within – but I’m not really inclined. I left NY because of that cold shit. Yeah, I know, dedicated nature photographer and all that, but make an offer if you like – I’ll certainly consider getting paid for it…
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 vest in the first place, which can not be credited to Chugtrollop; in fact, the originator is lost to time, probably because his wife threw out the initial sketches when she was ‘cleaning up.’ But we are certain that it was a man at least, because in the years before the first recorded evidence of a vest, there was a distinct fashion trend towards white shirts with ruffles and other silly-ass things that were certainly not the idea of any male. The function of the vest, or ‘waistcoat,’ was to have a dark-colored covering over the chest and stomach of the male wearer, because we all know how men eat, and getting stains out of white shirts was the bane of their existence.
[Fun fact:Any stains are actually quite easy to remove, with the proper chemicals, but the insistence on favoring cloth too delicate for these as the base material for white shirts is what causes all the problems in the first place. “Ooh, look at how great you look in silk!” Right. But even easy stuff to clean up gives women the opportunity to scold, and dry cleaners soon discovered the concept of extra fees for stain removal, meaning they could charge up front based solely on appearance, regardless of how little extra effort was involved in cleaning.]
Thus, the vest was born, masquerading as a fashion accessory while functionally easing the lives of men, hiding the drips from the mutton and serving as napkins when needed. You have not failed to notice that many vests use colorful and delicate material only for the backs, we assume? Had to be a man. The creator of the white vest was obviously some poncy bastard that was trying to show off and probably ate mostly dry salads.
Soon, it was discovered that by sewing a small square of extra fabric onto the vest, men had someplace to put their pocket watches, which before then had merely been held in one hand or dangled from an ear. These extra squares were quickly called “pockets” after the watches – many, many people assume that it was the other way around, but the Pocket Watch was a particular model created by Smedley Pocket with an extra compartment to hide nude engravings within; this also gave rise to the term, “pocket pool.” Soon afterward, pockets migrated to the trousers (surprise,) jackets, and billiard tables, which until that time had merely had ramps in the corners to launch the balls from.
[Fun fact: Both podiatrists and floor refinishers protested this change to billiards, but the pockets proved too popular, so they joined forces to invent the treacherous raised threshold and maintain their respective incomes.]
It was probably about a century later that Chugtrollop came up with his ‘brilliant’ idea; he was a working cinematographer and constantly fumbling around with lens caps, light meters, cable releases, gaffers’ tape, and model prods (which impressed cattlemen enough that they adapted a version for their own use, though at a lower voltage.) The Production Assistant had yet to come along, so Chugtrollop added numerous pockets to an old vest that he hadn’t used since the divorce, and began wearing this during his duties. This had the added benefit of making people assume the distended belly of the vest was burdened with tools of the trade and not simply a distended belly; every little bit helps. Other photographers took note that Chugtrollop could actually shake hands with prospective clients (or slap a Best Boy behind the ear) without needing a bench to pile stuff on, and the trend was soon on its way.
Chugtrollop’s real genius, however, was in marketing the accessory as a photographer’s vest, as if this meant it was specially designed or constructed or something, and thus was able to charge a premium price for a square meter of old canvas that didn’t even need to be measured for fit, a trend that continues to this day. He was inadvertently aided by the fact that anyone seeing him wearing it, having never seen one before, assumed that it was a specific tool of photographers and thus had to obtain one for themselves the moment they purchased a Kodak Brownie; the high price simply convinced them that they were correct.
[Fun fact: Chugtrollop had nothing to do with the trend of wearing a beret, or even of using a long cigarette holder – those both can be credited to others. Beret is in truth a French term that means, “incompetent hatmaker,” and they were originally rejects only sold to the impoverished, i.e., mimes. How they came to be used by filmmakers is another story and not germane to the holiday we’re celebrating.]
Today, vests with an inordinate amount of pockets automatically spell out, “photographer” to anyone that sees them, even though somehow you don’t hear people saying, “Wow, that’s a great photo – you must have a really good vest!” Yeah, we’re puzzled too. And they can be handy at times, though far more often, photographers waste time trying to determine which pocket holds the damn thing they’re trying to find at the moment. Admittedly, it would also be a hassle emptying out all the pockets before putting it in the wash, if indeed they were ever put in the wash. Their most important function, however, is announcing to one and all that here is a professional photographer, justifying the arrogant attitude that invariably goes along with wearing one. Without this, they would just be another asshole.
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 they’re damn cool and would certainly remember finding one again, but this is not an ant – instead, it is an antlike jumping spider, likely species Peckhamia americana, but even BugGuide.net has so little information on them that it’s not clear that anyone is sure. Some jumping spiders have developed the appearance of ants, and I’m not exactly sure if this is as a defensive measure or offensive; in other words, if it is to avoid predators or to assist them in their own predatory efforts.
While the eyes are a dead giveaway, it’s pretty hard to get this close a look at them in any normal circumstances, so the key feature that you’re looking for is two body segments instead of three: all spiders have a fused head and thorax (cephalothorax,) while ants have very distinct separations between them. Behavior-wise they’re a bit different too, which if I recall correctly is how I identified this one. Ants tend to move at a distinct quick pace and pause infrequently before resuming the same pace, while jumping spiders move slower and with a lot more investigating. Jumping spiders obtain more information from their eyes, while ants primarily use their antennae, and this is noticeable if you watch.
The magnification that was needed for these was quite high, as you’ll see in a moment, and I cheated quite a bit by capturing this specimen and photographing it on a detached flower stem held in a clamp, so I could turn the ‘stage’ as needed and try to keep up with the spider. The clamp was itself nestled in a small bowl of water to prevent the spider from simply making its escape. Nonetheless, even with such control I had an awful lot of images that didn’t pass muster, and more than a few that I only kept because they illustrated certain details. Like the one below.
This is full frame and it’s not terribly sharp, but this was before I had my handy-dandy little paper scales to insert into images, and so this is perched on my knuckle instead. If you were imagining something the size of one of those large black ants, you were way off – I’m fairly certain my friend here is less than half the length of those species and doesn’t top 5mm overall.
These came from 2012, when I was deeply into arthropod photography, largely because they were easy to pursue in the yard and what I was seeing the bulk of, and the images in my Arthropods folders still outclass the counts of any others, though Birds are catching up. Mammals still remains shamefully low – we’ll have to see if these can be boosted a bit…
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 peak for the past several days and it’s been way colder than that at night, so I really expected them to be remaining in shelter. However, that’s the edge of the dryer vent right alongside, so it seems likely that this one has found a pleasantly warm spot to spend the winter. I would have attempted to relocate a couple into the greenhouse, since it has a heater that maintains at least 10° and it got up over 20° in there today, but I’m not sure what this does to their metabolism, to say nothing of finding anything to eat in there, so I leave them to handle it on their own. But I think it’s safe to say this is the earliest appearance of the species that I’ve logged.
I should probably try the anoles out with mealworms, see if they like those as a food source, because I know I can keep those in the fridge for a while and thus would be able to provide snacks in circumstances like this. Seems like a fair trade for all the photos I’ve gotten of them over the years.
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 a few of the odd memory stories, all too short to make a complete post of – lame, perhaps, but then again, you’re not getting a single post out of each of them, so glass half full and all that.
In the town where I grew up [this is always awkward, because we moved when I was seven, and thus it can refer to two different towns depending on perspective, so if you’re a parent, think about what you’re doing to your child’s future blogging difficulties before you make that big move], we used to drive past this low brick wall, part of a landscaping façade on a particular piece of property that I always thought belonged to a church. This wall bore the cryptic message, “We thil M nor,” which I never understood and figured was Latin or something, because that’s what you get when you’re raised catholic. It was, literally, well over a decade before I realized that it was actually supposed to read, “Westhill Manor,” and of course no one in all that time had ever bothered to fix the damn thing.
For christmas one year, we were shipped four filet mignons as appreciation for some major project that my dad had worked on, and they arrived in an insulated container with a block of dry ice to keep them cold. Dry ice is of course an absolute blast to mess with, and my brother-in-law and I had a lot of fun creating fog clouds and bubbling jars of water. At one point he dared me to drink this witches brew, and I thought, Hey, it’s just carbon dioxide – as long as I don’t touch the chunk in the bottom of the jar, it’ll be fine. And so I took a nice slug, remembering that it tasted a bit sour but not otherwise remarkable.
I can vouch for this not being the wisest of moves, because the next day I came down with a throat infection far worse than any I’ve ever had before, taking better than two days to disappear. Carbon dioxide itself isn’t harmful, but whatever else it might be preserving in stasis within is another matter.
As a side note, we’d dropped a large chunk in a jar of water and left it on the porch to see how long it would take to disappear, which was quite a while, really. The next morning when I checked on it, the top half of the jar was frozen solid, with a little meandering channel up through the middle from where the expanding gas had continued to force its way out.
We always had cats when I was growing up, and were notoriously bad about having them spayed because it was expensive; thus, we had several litters of kittens throughout that time. The antics of the kittens were hugely entertaining, naturally, and while I cannot recall the particular maneuver that prompted this, they were responsible for the only complete ‘spit take’ that I’ve ever emitted, spraying the kitchen wall with the milk I was drinking from the spontaneous laughter. Which of course scared the shit out of them.
Not half as bad as the circumstance where one of the five-week-old kittens, obviously in search of the litter pan, darted out the back door onto the porch just as our German shepherd was coming in from the opposite, outside door. The shepherd was just fine with the kittens, but still big and overwhelming, and my mothers laughter and shout to come see brought me out onto the porch, where the kitten, every hair on its body standing out straight, arched back and tiptoe, viewed the dog with horror – with a large pile of shit directly under its tail. Apparently this really can happen.
Another time, the litter of kittens was at that age where they all cavort enthusiastically but a bit clumsily with each other, chasing their siblings around the room and across my parents’ bed. One spotted the full-length mirror on the closet door and realized that there was another entire room that it hadn’t seen yet, with more kittens hurtling around in there. It vaulted off the bed and darted straight for the mirror, but was brought up short right before hopping over the door sill (actually the exposed part of the closet door underneath the bottom edge of the mirror,) by another kitten suddenly getting in its way, nose to nose. There was a momentary pause at its own reflection, but the other room still beckoned, so it simply leaned to the side to jump past this new kitten into the gaping room beyond, and smacked headfirst into the mirror as the other kitten performed the exact same maneuver. There is this particular expression of confusion from cats, the ears laying back alternately with this little head wobble, and the kitten (the original, not the… well, both) displayed this before turning and hurtling off elsewhere.
I provoked this same look of confusion many years later on, when we had the abandoned kittens in the house getting socialized (one of which, though not the one from this story, is presently asleep on the desk immediately to my right as I type this.) Earlier that day, we had been to a promotional thing for area restaurants, where the restaurateurs were providing samples of their foods in a huge outdoor buffet, and I had sampled freely of chili, curious appetizers, spiced chocolates, and many exotic little things, a very eclectic meal of a few bites each. Hours later I was leaning back at my desk sipping a Pepsi with Marley, one of those kittens, nestled onto my chest, head almost beneath my chin. I felt a belch coming on, but it wasn’t fostered solely by the carbonated soda – everything that I’d eaten that day decided to vent forth as soon as the gate opened, and I accidentally blew this horrible rumbler straight into Marley’s face. All those myriad flavors repeated at once with no palate cleanser in between, not the best of experiences, and I knew Marley could sample them too by the look of horror that came across his face before he jumped down and ran away.
In the early nineties when I was working for the humane society, the staff all did rotations for emergency animal rescue on nights and weekends, and during one of my shifts I got a call about a snake in someone’s house. On speaking with the woman, I discovered that she hadn’t actually seen it, but could hear it slithering around above the ceiling over her head. This is unlikely, because snakes don’t really make sounds like the movies want to portray, and you can only hear them ‘slithering’ in certain circumstances, almost certainly not carrying through a ceiling, but at her insistence I agreed to come out and take a look.
The house was fairly deep in the woods and pretty old (for the US at least, built in the thirties or earlier,) and decorated to match, reminiscent of the style that elderly people still had when I was growing up, quite dark inside because the lighting all came from anemic single-bulb fixtures on the walls where the oil lamps used to be. The woman was a distinct match for this, an elderly black woman with a dialect that gave some indication that she’d lived there all her life. It was single-story house, and thankfully the attic had proper access via stairs instead of some ceiling panel, and even a single bulb in the roof peak illuminating most of it. I ventured up with my flashlight, noting the numerous boxes that filled at least half of the space, recognizing that I’d have to shift things for an hour to do a thorough search and not at all inclined to do so; we were rescue, not pest removal. I found several husks of nuts indicated that squirrels and mice had been using the space, and pocketed those to show her that this was almost certainly what she’d been hearing.
I was about to leave when I heard a faint sound behind me, indeed a soft slithering sound, and turned to see a massive black rat snake (properly eastern rat snake, but I didn’t know it then) slipping from between two boxes. About this time she asked if I was seeing anything, and I simply told her to hold on a second. Black rat snakes are harmless, even though this one was in the vicinity of two meters long, and I simply leaned over quickly and grabbed it. It made no attempt to bite but enthusiastically coiled around my arm and smeared me with feces, a common defense. I hadn’t bothered to bring a carrier or a bag with me, so I was going to have to carry it out to the van this way, and I started back down the steps with my arm wrapped in black snake.
“Did you see anything?” she asked before I came into view, and I replied, “Might have,” as I appeared with the snake.
Her eyes grew huge as she said, “Oh lord, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I replied nonchalantly, “but could you get me a couple of wet paper towels?”
“What do you need those for?” she asked, momentarily confused.
“Because he just shit all over my arm.”
“Shut your mouth!” she responded in the most southern way possible, seeming so stereotypical that I couldn’t help but laugh. The whole experience was like stepping back in time half a century, something that I’d never experienced before moving to North Carolina, but there really are rural sections that somehow resist change.
It was some years later that I discovered that she had had two other workers out there on other nights, perhaps even the same week, both discovering that the house was apparently a black snake hostel, though I think I’m the only worker that actually removed one. I can’t recall where exactly this place was, but I’d be delighted to go back just to see it again.
A year or so after this incident, I had just adopted my first cat Ben at the same time that I was dating a supremely psychotic individual, and I’m not using that word cavalierly. Ben occasionally traveled back and forth with me as I spent nights over at her place, and on the night that I broke it off with her, I was attempting to leave when all hell broke loose. That’s a story in itself, but suffice to say that at one point, in someone’s yard a little ways down the street, a police officer was shining his flashlight onto the back of my neck and saying quietly to another, “That’s a bite wound.” Take it from me: heed those signs, and don’t believe that you can change things.
As I was returning to my car to leave once and for all, I discovered that the driver’s side door was still standing open, and Ben had been in the car and not in a carrier. This whole altercation had gone on for better than 45 minutes at this point. I was even more anguished now, realizing that I would have to try and locate a solid black kitten at 1 AM, or return numerous times, and the chances of actually locating him were slim. I cursed despondently and the officer accompanying asked what that was about.
“Oh, my cat had been in the car – try and keep your eyes open for a little black kitten about four months old,” I responded wearily.
“Is that him?” the officer asked, and I could see that his light was shining through the back window of the car, where Ben was standing on the back of the seat, eyes glowing in the flashlight. Despite all the ruckus, the door standing wide open, and my disappearance for so long, Ben hadn’t left the car at all, and for that I will be forever grateful. He remained a faithful companion for eighteen years and several moves, with barely the slightest hint of trouble, and was always happy to meet new people. It could easily have been different from that very night, so all credit to him for staying put.
I find I have to add this one, from when Ben was about six years old. A friend of mine found herself needing someone to watch her dog for a few hours each week, and we wanted to see how my cats (three by this time) would handle it, knowing that the dog was already good with cats, and in fact quite fond of them. This dog (Maya) was a basset/golden retriever mix, basically a low-rider retriever, and stood about a third of a meter tall, so not a lot more than a cat in height (a bit more in mass, however.) So we brought Maya into the house slowly, bringing her down the entry hallway gradually. The two other cats scattered, but Ben always had this fascination with things that terrified him, unable to take his eyes off of them, and so Maya crept slowly up the hall while Ben sat frozen and watched. Eventually they deigned to touch noses, and because Maya had been so hesitant and nonthreatening Ben had held his ground. Maya turned back to her owner in delight at having made a new friend, but then turned a little too quickly back to Ben who, startled, swatted her on the nose.
Maya, unable to fathom what change had just taken place, retreated behind her owner’s legs and viewed Ben with grave mistrust, while Ben observed this carefully. Now, I’m the first to say that Ben was not the brightest tool in the shed, and in fact was quite slow-witted, but he figured out this new dynamic and the advantages that could be had, and for the remainder of that evening, he stalked Maya around the apartment like the best of horror movie villains – not pursuit, just following in a slow, menacing way. At one point he convinced this thirty-kilo dog to clamber onto the couch and up along the back behind her owner until I removed him from the couch and put him in the bedroom (where the other two had long ago sought hideyholes.) Whether there was actual menace in his actions or just this curiosity to keep watching the dog avoid him, I can’t say, but it was certainly amusing to watch, and way out of character for him.
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 of a pair that drew close while I was holding still. The options for fish of that shape and coloration are minimal, so I’m almost certain these are redfin needlefish (Strongylura notata,) and these are not large specimens, somewhere between 15-25 cm in length – at least, according to the original post back in 2011, which was only seven or so years after the fact rather than two decades as we are now.
The huge accomplishment, for me, was somehow capturing a tiny specimen, ~50mm in length, that I was able to bring home and photograph within my macro aquarium – I don’t recall how I managed the capture, because they’re very fast fish, but here we are.
The actual volume within this particular macro aquarium was about a deck of cards, so there wasn’t too much room for the fish to move away from the glass and I could manage to track tight focus halfway decently. This closer crop of the same frame illustrates this reasonably well:
You can just make out the tiny teeth lining those jaws, and only because I sharpened the image slightly for web display. That eye is in the realm of 1mm in diameter, so you can calculate the size of the teeth yourself; suffice to say that I wasn’t concerned about putting my hand in there. Hell, I have a stingray barb, taken from a dead specimen, that is about the same size and shape as my model here.
I’m long overdue for a trip to Florida, but there’s nothing imminent right at the moment. I probably should put some effort into scheduling one – not specifically for more photos of redfin needlefish, but I’ll snag them if the opportunity arises…
Just a small moment of triumph, kinda. With the reformatting of the main computer under Ubuntu Studio now (a form of Linux operating system,) I had to reinstall several different things that I’d been using, and among them was the MIDI keyboard. MIDI is just a musical interface to take an electronic input (such as a small piano-style keyboard, as opposed to what I’m typing on right now) and create music with it. Or, discordant banging around. Linux does not play well with MIDI out-of-the-box, and needs a lot of formatting to recognize it and send it through multiple layers into whatever software you actually want to use, and this is where I give Windows full credit, because for all of the times that I’ve had to download new drivers and support software and ridiculous doodads for Windows programs, Direct-X and .Net framework and so on, it recognizes a MIDI keyboard effortlessly and with no extra fudging about.
But Linux, boy howdy! ALSA and Jack and PulseAudio and formatting input/output channels can take a while, and much longer when something fails to work and you end up trying to troubleshoot the issue. Notably, the audio handler PulseAudio is widely recognized to be both problematic and almost superfluous, and I was attempting to avoid it altogether to use its much-improved replacement, Pipewire.
Long story short: Ubuntu Studio came with most of this installed but not at all configured, and my attempts to use Pipewire came to naught. I did get the system working with just about a ground-up reinstall and reformat of the whole path, using PulseAudio, and can now produce the same vaguely musical sounds from the main system that I had been before. And, from the Backup Server as well, which has two operating systems determined at boot, Linux Mint and Windows 7; the MIDI interface is through Windows because it has a much more versatile bit of software (Reason Lite 11.) In Ubuntu I’m using Rosegarden, which works fine but hasn’t anywhere near the instrument variety without a lot more playing around. I’m also using Hydrogen as a drum emulator. Ubuntu Studio has a ton of pre-installed software for music production (and video, and graphics,) and I will be trying those out eventually. Right now, I can do what I was doing before. so I’m back on track.
Now, how long it’s going to take me to compose the new music that I’ve been meaning to get to, that’s another matter…
It’s still winter anyway, and I’m not going to be out shooting anything unless we get some snow. I’ve been spending the time tweaking the computer and cleaning up some odds and ends, and among those was correcting some typos in the blog tags. Mind you, I correct typos in the posts themselves too (when I’m aware that they’re there – more on that in a second,) but the tags field does not allow spellcheck to function within it, don’t ask me why, so I get no little squiggly-red-underline reminders. I do get them when I dump the tags into a database (or at least when LibreOffice is working correctly,) but it also flags every last species name used, and there are a shitload of them – a couple of them probably are misspelled but I’m not going through and checking those. But for giggles, I’m going to list several of the legit typos here – don’t waste your time looking for them because they’re already corrected. Mostly.
afghanistan – Some of my tags are purposefully not capitalized, like “pope” and “islam,” but this was not one of them.
all the commments keep me confident
Blue Ridge Moutains
Dayight Saving Time – I knew to keep “Saving” singular at least…
Denelsbeckisms – I don’t know why this was flagged, because it’s absolutely correct, so probably an outdated dictionary
except in years evenly divisibly by 49 – I’m notoriously bad about typing “actually” when I only want “actual,” and I have no idea that I’m doing it, nor does spellcheck care about that. But it seems it’s not the only word that I do that with.
healh – Right alongside “healthfood nuts” in the same post, too.
Jum Jeffries – That’s supposed to be “Jim.” Yes, his name is Jum Jim…
Love Is a Battlefied
mallar – That’s a castrated mallard…
measureable benefit – I’m a fairly decent speller, but this is an honest mistake of mine – I’m never quite sure when the silent “E”s carry over.
misleading langauge – But that’s just from typing too fast.
molluscs – While “mollusks” is probably what the internal dictionary wanted, this is actually a legit spelling as well, and makes more sense.
not exactly photojurnalism
now with vitamn Meh! – It’s fine with “meh,” believe it or not…
one goddman thing after another – I actually kinda like this one and am letting it remain.
pattern recogniton – I had to load a new plugin that allowed for tags to be merged, because I knew this was already used properly in two other posts. However, I screwed up and ended up wiping out both the misspelled one and the correct one, and I’m not sure what posts featured it, so we’re just saying goodbye to that tag here.
resiving images
sounds pretty believeable – Again.
stablity – This is a real word, meaning “like a stable…”
But while we’re here for no good reason, we’ll have the image counts for the past year too, because I finished sorting (and the multiple backups that go alongside.) So the counts in my various categories are:
Aquatic – 41
Arthropods – 491
Beach – 95
Birds – 2,915!
Invertebrates – 33
Lakes/Streams/Waterfalls – 206
Leaves/Plants/Trees – 587
Mammals – 304 (with 205 of those being horses shot on a single day…)
Reptiles/Amphibians – 899
Scenic/Abstract – 370
Science/Miscellaneous – 398
Space – 513
Sunrise/Sunset – 196
That makes 7,098, only not really because some of those are duplicated across categories. That’s out of not quite 18,000 images actually taken during the year, making it roughly a 40% keeper rate. This may sound bad, but it’s within the average for working professionals, and when you’re pursuing subjects like diving osprey and lightning and meteor showers, a good number of those are gonna get tossed, and rightfully so. Chasing numbers in this manner may encourage a photographer to keep more than they really should, which is only going to reduce the overall value and impressions of their photos. And you can just keep your comments about that to yourselves…
[I have to note here that not counted among them are not just the various personal and project photos that don’t count as stock, but a whopping 35 photos of Mr Bugg chimping, because I know he’s anxious to compare counts and I challenge him to produce any photos of your truly in return ;-) ]
But that’s enough for now. We’ll close with one of the first images from last year, the first in the Space category at least, moonrise out on Jordan Lake as countless seagulls (I think) cruised past on their way to their nighttime roosts. Taken just over a year ago, meaning I’m already behind. Sheesh.
“Did you see anything?” she asked before I came into view, and I replied, “Might have,” as I appeared with the snake. 
Maya, unable to fathom what change had just taken place, retreated behind her owner’s legs and viewed Ben with grave mistrust, while Ben observed this carefully. Now, I’m the first to say that Ben was not the brightest tool in the shed, and in fact was quite slow-witted, but he figured out this new dynamic and the advantages that could be had, and for the remainder of that evening, he stalked Maya around the apartment like the best of horror movie villains – not pursuit, just following in a slow, menacing way. At one point he convinced this thirty-kilo dog to clamber onto the couch and up along the back behind her owner until I removed him from the couch and put him in the bedroom (where the other two had long ago sought hideyholes.) Whether there was actual menace in his actions or just this curiosity to keep watching the dog avoid him, I can’t say, but it was certainly amusing to watch, and way out of character for him.
