This week we have a female common yellowthroat (Geothlypis trichas) – I believe, anyway. It was the closest match that I could find, but since there were no males in evidence, I won’t say that I’m 100% certain (the males being more distinctly colored.) I snagged this almost offhandedly while touring through Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge in central New York three years ago – which is where I was not quite a week ago, though the day this was taken had considerably better conditions than the most recent visit, which was overcast and rainy. So, I had the chance to remove this from the ‘Just Once’ list only days ago, but saw nothing of the sort in the brief visit. Now, they’re also supposed to be found around here in central North Carolina, though I have yet to positively identify one, but they’re marsh birds and so more likely to be found nearer the coast.
[As a stupid bit of trivia, I had only days before switched the incoming text alert sound on my smutphone over to the call of a marsh wren, obtained from the same video clips found here, and this was firing off while we were driving through the refuge – the sounds of home, as it were, though they elicited no response from anywhere therein. But it did serve to confuse my brother a couple of times…]
Last week, I announced that the 23rd was World Turtle Day, but also that I’d be unlikely to do anything about it that day – this was because I knew I’d be traveling, and in fact, all of last week’s posts were written ahead of time and scheduled for certain days, none of them reflecting where I really was. Family matters (nothing serious) required that I shoot out to Tennessee, then up to New York, and the 23rd was slated to be a driving day, which it was.
However, I managed to snag two turtles on days flanking World Turtle Day, so I observed the holiday better than expected, though not in any remarkable way.
In Tennessee on Tuesday, I came across this eastern box turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina) at the edge of a small cleared area where I was staying. Reluctant to do anything after being disturbed and likely wanting to escape the rapidly-warming sunlight, it never poked its head out or posed fetchingly, but I did determine from the eyes and the plastron that it was a male, and comparing the photos taken by my host of another turtle from a few days earlier indicated that this was not the same specimen, suggesting that the property was home to several – not surprising, really, but this was the only one that I found.
And then on Saturday, once up in central New York, we found another just after crossing the road.
This is a common snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina,) extremely common in New York – it’s a smaller specimen, roughly 15-18 cm in carapace length. This was immediately following a downpour and we saw no reason to disturb it, so this was taken from the car window and then the turtle was allowed to go on its way. Had it actually been World Turtle Day, we might have given it a cake or taken it out to dinner or something, but being too late for the holiday, it would have to wait for next year.
There will be more coming along, even though I didn’t do a lot of photography on this trip and conditions conspired against it too often anyway, but I got a few frames of interest. They’ll be along as time permits.
Today, by the way, is also a holiday of sorts, in that it’s the tenth anniversary of our moving to this house – that’s almost scary, really. But we’re available for dinner if you’re so inclined…
[I realized as I linked that post from 10 years ago that there were mantids on the same Japanese maple out front, and so I went out just now specifically to take a commemorative shot. Same tree, but certainly not the same mantis, since they only live through a season. There’s a semi-reasonable chance that this is a descendant, though, since I suspect that mantids return to the same location where they had hatched to produce their own egg clusters. There is a degree of resemblance, you must admit…]
Yesterday was one holiday, and today is another (don’t ask me who schedules these things without any breathing room):National Where The Hell Did This Come From? Day, and I’ve got a nice example for you, discovered in the back yard here at Walkabout Estates.
First off, ignore the brown wormy thing, which is just a millipede that was passing through as I snapped the image. My brother tells me this is a sunfish, but there are several species and the state of this one isn’t making it easy to pin down, so Family Centrarchidae anyway. The thing is, we’re not terribly close to any water source, and I even know a four-hour time frame of its appearance in late afternoon since I had been through that area earlier and it wasn’t present.
Best guess, of course, is that it was snagged from the neighborhood pond by an osprey and accidentally dropped, either as the bird was passing or as it landed in a tree to knock off its meal, though this seems odd in itself; ospreys have wicked talons and can easily hang onto something as small as this, and even the damage to the carcass seems less than I would have thought they’d inflict in capturing a fish from the water and hauling it off through the air. Not to mention that there does not seem to be any osprey living nearby or frequenting the pond, even though they make the occasional appearance. Mid-afternoon isn’t any time for raccoons, opossums, or neighborhood cats to be slinking around, especially inside the fence. I’m not the kind that watches all of those TV forensics shows so I didn’t try evaluating the angle of the wounds or the impact impression underneath, and it’s too late now; this was a couple of weeks ago. So I’ll go with clumsy osprey and leave it at that I suppose, always wondering what sinister story might really lie underneath. It wouldn’t be the first time…
While I would be totally chuffed to have obtained such a pic of a bobcat (Lynx rufus) in the wild, alas, this is not the case, and this was taken in the NC Zoological Park, part of the reason that it’s only appeared once before. The other part is that, while I’ve seen bobcats twice before to my memory, both times were fleeting and far too brief to bring a camera to bear. As I look at this however, I chide my older self for not framing this better, but I’m fairly certain I slammed the frame out in the bare moment that the bobcat made eye contact.
Bobcats are common throughout North America, and in fact there are now two recognized subspecies:Lynx rufus rufus in the east, and Lynx rufus fasciatus in the west – given that I took this in a zoo in North Carolina, I’d tend to believe this is the former, but who knows how they obtained their specimen? Yet while common, bobcats are also quite shy and tend to be nocturnal, so the chances to spot one are rare, and you largely have to be either very lucky or specifically trying for the subject; up until this writing I’ve never spent enough time in an area they were known to frequent. Both of those that I’ve spotted have been bounding across the road ahead of me, come to think of it: once on Pilot Mountain in NC, actually on the drive into the park (late morning,) and once in Merritt Island in Florida (late afternoon) – that one was huge, and crossed the two-lane road in three bounds. There was a chance that I saw one near Jordan Lake right around here, but it was a fleeting glimpse (true to form, seen in the headlights of the car,) and I’ve found no evidence of them there before or since, so I may have been mistaken.
So let’s put it this way: if I ever discover that they’re frequenting an area that I can spend a little time in, I’ll definitely make the attempt to snag some truly “wild” images – much more effort than I’d put into chasing any songbird, for instance. Or if, you know, there’s some chance of commensurate income from such photos, I’ll even make a dedicated trip – we can deal.
Thursday, May 23rd, is World Turtle Day – but I’m sure you already knew that, at the very least from reading it here several times before. This time around, however, I am unlikely to have any free time that day to pursue it in any form, and will have to catch up later, so I’m putting this in your capable hands – no, not those hands, and you really should wash them, but your capable ones. Go do something turtley, or educate someone about turtles, or even do a little research on them yourself. How many do you have in your own state? Okay, that’s an extremely tall order, so let’s shorten that down to how many different species? Can you dependably find one? At this time of year, you should, especially if you’re on this blog, so go ahead and prove it to me.
Yeah, I know, throwing down challenges in a somewhat condescending manner immediately after claiming to be too busy to do it myself, but you know, things do come up. Whatever – I’ll be back later on and make up for it to some extent. Right now we have a pic from a few weeks back, while checking on one of the osprey nests.
Not close enough to be sure, but I believe these are pond sliders (Trachemys scripta,) and there are only two – the third head is only a bump on the stump. And for the record, the most recent turtle image that I’ve obtained, as well:
Yeah, I know it sucks, and it’s not even going to survive the sorting cull, but it’s the latest, a grab shot right before it disappeared. I provide it in good faith, or some shit like that, establishing that at least I’ve done something within the month without even trying. Yeah, “That’s obvious,” ha ha ha, go do something better…
On this date a whopping 60 years ago, there came an accidental discovery that helped confirm, and inform, our present view of the universe: the cosmic microwave background (CMB) was first measured.
Here’s the quick run down. Observations of many stars in the observable universe, generally around the early 1900s, showed light spectra that were very similar to our own sun, with gaps in certain wavelengths that likely came from wavelength absorption by certain elements. These gaps were near-perfectly aligned, but shifted lower in wavelength consistently – some by small increments, others by larger, still with the same spacing between gaps. As an object accelerates away from us, the wavelengths get longer and thus more red, which nicely explained this shift (called redshift or doppler shift – it happens with sound as well, but of course in pitch and not color.) The thing was, every star so measured displayed this redshift, meaning that either they were all accelerating away from us, which has no reasonable impetus, or the universe was expanding uniformly, so everything got farther away from everything else, and the same redshift would be viewed from any planet around those other stars. This suggested that the universe was once in a much smaller state, and various other bits of evidence began to support this, but it had not yet become accepted as fact.
spectrum of our own sun, courtesy of NASA. Image Credit: Nigel Sharp (NSF), FTS, NSO, KPNO, AURA, NSF One line of reasoning suggested that, given all of the measurements of speed and distance and even radiometric decay, the universe began this acceleration between 10 and 20 billion years ago, and should have displayed some residual energy left over from this very small state, visible everywhere – except that it was so weak and so attenuated in wavelength that it was invisible and immeasurable with any radio telescope at the time.
[Brief explanation: electromagnetic radiation is defined by its wavelength, and between about 400 and 700 nanometers it becomes visible to our eyes, but on either side of that it’s invisible and is called ‘radio’ waves or ‘microwaves,’ and you see where this is going.]
That residual radiation was proposed for a few decades to pop up at certain wavelengths, but it was in 1948 that it was shown to likely exist in the microwave spectrum, at roughly 160 Ghz or 1.8 million nanometers (the science geeks are losing their minds right now but that’s how it compares to the visible light figures in the paragraph above) – also, extremely weakly. There was no way to detect this, so it remained theoretical.
Then in 1964, Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias were calibrating a new radio telescope and couldn’t achieve an empty baseline – in other words, they couldn’t clear the ‘static.’ After many attempts that retained a persistent reading at a certain wavelength, they made the connection with proposed efforts from physicists at Princeton University and contacted them, and it was soon determined that they’d found the CMB; bear in mind that the theoretical paper had been published 16 years earlier and wasn’t even part of college courses.
What this meant, however, was that of the two main competing theories about the nature of the universe – the ‘big bang’ theory (itself originally a derogatory term) and the ‘steady state’ theory, almost the default assumption for centuries that the universe is as it always was and will be – the discovery of the CMB tipped the scales very much in favor of the Big Bang and put a distinct age to the universe. Just in my own lifetime, this age has gone from as stated above to 13.787 billion years (+/- 0.14%) due to refinements in measurements and technical abilities.
Primarily, this is exactly the kind of confirmation that we look for when we make predictions, and while there still remains a level of uncertainty about both the numbers and the underlying process itself, any new theories have to take into account how well the CMB fits into the initial numbers; it’s there, it’s measurable, so something must have caused it. Moreover, one of the coolest and most impactful discoveries in modern astronomy was initially a source of significant frustration for Penzias and Wilson, who weren’t even trying to find it.
The radio antenna itself, long disused now, still sits where it was constructed, with plans to turn the area into a park and preserve the antenna itself. Which is good, because we have too few science-themed parks and too little recognition of those that made many of these accomplishments. Seriously, why should we give a shit about some sports figure?
It’s been exactly five months since the previous Profiles, so we’re definitely overdue, and we’re not buying that you haven’t fully recovered from that one; you have undoubtedly noticed that we’ve avoided saying “last one” and likely suspect there’s a reason for that.
This Profiles we have Abelard, who self identifies as an influencer, proudly we might add; even worse. Typical for the breed, Abelard spends his time posing in manners no one ever achieves casually, making bystanders believe he has palsy or perhaps a lizard in his shirt until they see the ringlight and stand. He’s so deep in the mindset that he’s mounted his home TV in a vertical position as well and doesn’t understand why everything is sideways. He heard that camera shops sold filters and bought a bunch, but couldn’t figure out how to get them into the card slot on his phone. We could go on like this all day, but we figured we’d stick to form and ask Abelard about his career background – this only made him turn and look behind him in confusion. Eventually, by exercising far more patience than should have been necessary, we found that Abelard couldn’t remember how he got his start, or indeed, most of the countries that he’d traveled to in pursuit of his obsession; there was, “the one with the big cool tower,” and, “the one where everyone spoke gibberish,” which we later determined was his parents’ house. Nonetheless, he does have plans for later on: he would like to investigate the rumor that other people had social media accounts that were not just to follow his own, and he’d also like to indulge in a wild streak and eat at a restaurant without posting about it. And yet, tragedy has marred his life as well; he watched his friend dying after getting gored by a bison, and the video was ruined by the idiot that kept repeating, “Call 911,” like someone’s gonna know how to do that. Plus who would have suspected those horns weren’t just that cool ‘Viking’ filter? Abelard tried to form his own band but kept finding people who wanted to “play music” rather than simply pose for the album covers. When we pressed him for a favorite, he maintained that the absolute best Pantone was 2308 C, which again, tells you enough.
It won’t be next week, but the Profiles will return, and notice that we didn’t say it wouldn’t be this week. Sweet dreams!
Not every project that I tackle comes to fruition, and I’m forced to abandon more than a couple (like the tracking motor to use with the eclipse, for instance.) But, as the title says, this one did.
For the record (Hah! I keel me!) this was the previous incarnation of it mentioned within the video. But here’s what I was dealing with this time around:
I have a decent audio recorder, and a decent lapel microphone. But the mic is intended for use with smutphones, and so has the quad-pole connector that those use, which allows for earphones and phone controls. This does not play well with the audio recorder designed before those were in constant use – that instead wants a tri-pole connector (stereo.)
I still have the little microphone seen in that linked post, but its audio quality is not very good and produced too much residual noise, more than I really wanted to edit out (especially since, with ongoing ambient sounds, there was no way to record a patch of ‘silence’ as a baseline to subtract this residual noise.)
So I switched to using the nice lapel mic with the smutphone as a recorder, but then went through three different audio recording apps before settling on the fourth, since the others wanted to do their own thing with auto-levels, essentially deciding what the base volume (okay, gain) should be. This produced some really terrible effects, given that the ambient sounds could get quite loud, especially in the height of cicada season, and quite variable, with the goddamn traffic too close by. What this produces is a lot of warbling and vague underwater-like sounds, very unrealistic and distracting.
Those ambient sounds were quite a chore in themselves, since at times the cicadas really started winding up, and diesel trucks were passing, and so on. The day I chose for the video above was the quietest of all my attempts, and you can hear how un-quiet it really was.
And then, once I got decent audio, it was time to synchronize it with the video – which came with its own audio track that was quite useful in itself, though it captured absolutely none of the nest sounds. Meanwhile, the nest mic captured too little of the ambient sounds, making the adults seem incredibly distant. That’s what they’re made for of course, to record the wearer and not everyone else, but it did mean that I wanted to keep both audio tracks.
Since I simply set the smutphone to record in its position underneath the nest and left it there, it produced one long recording track, while I was able to start and stop the video camera as appropriate to the action and lack thereof. This meant that I had four video tracks of two to five minutes and one audio that was eighteen minutes long, with ambient noise none too distinguishable throughout. You know those little clappers that you see right before they shoot a movie scene? That’s what those are for: syncing separate video and audio tracks. Without such a thing, I was forced to sync them by finding unique sound fragments that appeared in both recordings, such as some other birds and distinctive passing vehicles. Note, however, that these largely had to be down to fractions of a second, or curious ‘echoes’ would be produced by the sounds that carried onto both tracks but weren’t perfectly aligned. There may be methods to jog the track alignments by milliseconds in the editing program that I used, but if so, I didn’t know where it was, so I was doing it by twitching the mouse – a bit tedious.
Once these were aligned, then I had to trim them down, ensuring that all tracks were cut in the same place and stayed aligned. Add in selecting the right gain for each (boosting the nest audio slightly, reducing the videocamera’s by an almost-equal amount.) Once satisfied with the running edit, then I had to record the voiceover track on another program while watching the video, clean that up, insert it into the video editing program, and then play with the gain and synchronization on that. Oh, yeah, and add in the title and close images.
And then, upload it to Vimeo and do all the little doodads that that requires. This means a five-minute video can take several hours to get together – be nice if it better reflected all this effort, right? Keep your commentary to yourself.
So while I like including video and know that this comes with its own learning curve, sometimes this drags on a bit, you know?
* * *
For the record, I am presently using Kdenlive for the video editing, and Audacity for the audio – both extremely capable programs for completely free software. For the nest recording, this was through ASR Voice Recorder from the Google Play Store (yes, Android.) But I also can’t stress enough how much easier it is when your microphones are decent. The lapel mic was a solid find from some generic source, far less expensive that its capability reflects, while the main recording mic on the desk (voiceovers and podcasts) is a Samson G-Track – expensive, but I picked it up used and it’s been superb.
This week we go back twenty years and two weeks, to see one of the many species that I collected and kept in the saltwater aquarium briefly to get a few detail pics. This is a gulf pipefish (Syngnathus scovelli,) a close relative of sea horses as you might have guessed, and pretty common in the Indian River Lagoon near where I used to live, this being Florida. I’m not exactly sure this was my first encounter, but I recall grabbing a handful of weeds to feed the other occupants of the aquarium and finding something wriggling within. [As a side note, nothing actually ate the weeds, seen in the background here, but instead fed upon the algae, isopods, and organic debris collected within.] Generally in the range of 80-100mm in length and slow swimmers, pipefish rely more on staying hidden and camouflaging themselves, and they were extremely good at this in the particular area that I was finding them, because it was near several longneedle pine trees that overhung the water. The needles themselves are all attached to a common base stem off of the branches, and when the needles were gone the bare stems (that would detach themselves from the trees and fall into the water,) looked exactly like a pipefish, or vice versa. I couldn’t tell you how many times I was snorkeling and thought, Ah, another pipefish – no, forget it, that’s just one of those damn pine stems, as well as a couple of times saying to myself, Another pine stem – no, wait, that IS a pipefish.
I could never keep these guys long in the aquarium, because it never carried their preferred food – except once. One of the grass shrimp had produced young, a cloud of them drifting through the water no more than 2mm in length, and two pipefish were knocking those down like popcorn, more animated than I’d ever seen them. I managed to capture one of the newborn shrimp for detailed macro photos, which was a challenge in itself (I’ve improved a bit since then,) but the tank was devoid of the shrimplings within an hour.
By the way, the pale pancake-like fins seen in the image at top are actually egg cases for the kings crown conchs, though I never saw these hatch out. But also in there is a small, unidentified crab, right among the conch eggs and tucked neatly within the curve of the pipefish’s body – all you can really see is a mottled grey thing, though if you look very closely you’ll make out a couple legs at top of the blob. The crabs and the pipefish ignored one another and lived in quiet harmony within the tank, as did most of the denizens. The kings crown conchs, however, were rapacious carnivorous snails that fed on other snail species and could scour the tank clean of such within days, so they never stayed long either.
I had planned to have a couple of posts pop up in this past week and was working towards some nice little presentations, but many things happened to prevent this and I simply did not have my shit together even slightly, thus the post title.
Foremost in there was something in recognition of World Migratory Bird Day, specifically some video, but I was having a devil of a time getting a decent audio recording, largely due to the utter racket of the cicadas right now; I do have decent recordings of those, however, and they sound like this:
Brood XIX, 13-year cicadas in 2024
Amongst all this were issues with recorders and auto-level effects that I did not want, microphones that were inadequate for the job, a ridiculous amount of traffic on the road not far enough away, and so on.
But while I was out getting the first audio clip, late last week, I started tracking a distant, repeated call that was intriguing, and eventually drew quite close to it, helped considerably by its repetition over a period of several minutes – that’s practically unheard of for bird calls.
Always the same ol’ song
I didn’t fully recognize the calls, though I recognized the producer once I spotted it – the pitch seemed quite different from what I’d encountered before, and the repetition seemed atypical as well, but I could clearly see the bird’s head bobbing during the calls, so there’s no question that it was this guy:
That’s a red-headed woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus,) in adult plumage to boot, so not a young one asking for food or anything – it’s too early in the year for that anyway. I would have combined the audio with video, except that I didn’t have the tripod with me and you really don’t want to see video shot at 600mm handheld.
But on World Migratory Bird Day itself, I was out checking the status of some osprey (Pandion haliaetus) nests, on the odd chance that someone had hatched. For the first, I shot a little video – nothing elaborate, but hey, I was making the effort, right?
Bear in mind that I was using the shotgun microphone aimed directly at the nests, which greatly reduced the ambient noise off-axis, as well as reducing the audio track in the mix afterwards – it was noisy as hell, is what I’m trying to say, but that’s Saturday morning for you. And yes, I was shooting east in the morning, hardly the time to be doing so, but it was when I was available to do so. I’ll be checking back a little later on, when it’s a sunny afternoon (it’s been raining all day as I type this.)
We’ll have some still photos from that session as well.
This is the closer one – 75 meters, maybe? I have no way to measure it with any degree of accuracy.
Cropped a lot tighter for this one, since it was at least three times farther off – it won’t provide any decent photos unless I’m there right as the young are learning to fly, but it’s in the same area, able to be seen with just a slight turn of the tripod head, so I take the opportunity while there.
And this is the mate of the one immediately above, not too far away from the nest and simply hanging out. As I said in the video, this will change soon enough, and he’ll get a lot busier.
These were in a marshy stump field a little ways from Jordan Lake, but then I went to a location on the lake itself to do more checking. I could see nothing regarding the nest there, since it was harshly backlit and at a much greater distance, but then a shadow crossed me as something passed in front of the sun, and I looked up to find this one:
I wasn’t watching anywhere close to the sun, since I like not being blind, so I would have missed this one had it not conveniently thrown some shade. By the way, this is full frame, not cropped at all – my little friend here was close.
The bay where I was is half-shrouded by trees, so losing sight of any given bird takes place often, but given the time frame, I’m reasonably certain that the same one reappeared a few minutes later and was half-heartedly hunting some distance off, backing suddenly as it spotted something below, but then resuming its casual circling as it decided the prey wasn’t viable.
This looks like it’s descending for prey, but it never dove as I watched – just paused and semi-hovered in midair, watching the water, the moved on again.
Much later on and further around the lakeshore, I heard some osprey calls pretty close by and one hove into view almost directly overhead, which I have determined is about the worst place for me to get decent pics – I just can’t crane backwards with the long lens and keep the camera steady enough. But as it passed and I could adopt a more natural pose, I snagged some acceptable frames.
There remains the possibility that this is the exact same one, since it appeared from the direction that the previous had disappeared towards, but there are enough osprey at the lake that this is hardly conclusive. I could immediately see that the osprey was being followed, but I didn’t make out by what – it initially looked like a crow, though I immediately raised the camera to my eye and was concentrating on snagging the closer bird instead. And the reason that it was being chased was clear enough; someone believed that the bullhead should be shared.
As the osprey was getting further off I switched to the pursuer, which didn’t help much at all, given that I was seeing it from directly behind and still largely backlit.
Even as a still photo enlarged far beyond what could be seen in the viewfinder, this is pretty inconclusive, though some hints remain, and I do have to say that the pursuer was flapping as rapidly as a crow, even when I’ve never seen a crow attempting to chase an osprey (and we have plenty of them around here, believe me.) But as the pursuer turned more broadside, I got a couple of frames that were good enough for identification.
That’s definitely a bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus,) almost certainly second year, and I believe this was about the time that the eagle realized that it wasn’t going to catch up with the osprey. Given a little altitude, eagles can dive and pick up a lot of speed, but down near the water in level flight, they’re slower and far less agile than osprey. I did not at all get the impression of how big the bird was, like four times the size of a crow, but I admit to not really focusing on it until this point.
Also, eagles are not really migratory, so they don’t count for the holiday, and I shouldn’t even have been wasting frames on them at all. Which includes the pair that were higher overhead while this was going on, apparently also trying to keep tabs on the osprey.
These both have white heads, but the tails aren’t as distinctively white and the upper one still shows mottling beneath the wings, so I’m going to call both of these four-year-olds, just transitioning into adult coloration. There had been no sign of any of these until the osprey appeared with the fish, and I wonder where they’d been hanging out – it could easily have been hundreds of meters away and the pursuit had been going on for longer than I suspected.
And that’s all that I ended up getting for the holiday, but if you’ll excuse me, the rain appears to have stopped and I might have the opportunity to snag what I couldn’t on the weekend. Stay tuned…