Several days back I resolved to post the below image again today but, you know, didn’t bother to set it up ahead of time and schedule the post or anything. So now with just over two hours remaining I suddenly remember it, but at least I’m not late late.
Once again, Happy Holidays, Season’s Greetings, und so weiter.
Now I gotta get on tomorrow’s post…
I’ve been busy as all-git-out recently, no time for much of anything else, especially blog-related, so I’m doing a quick hand-off to a couple of videos that fit well.
First off we have George Hrab, he of The Geologic Podcast over there on the sidebar or indeed right here, with, “I Don’t Believe in christmas,” a song of his from many years ago and quite pleasant, belying the impression you might have gotten from the title. But we have a conundrum as we do so, because his original video from 1990 (?!) features the full musical accompaniment, making it much richer in my ears, but the video quality is less than stellar, shall we say? Bank surveillance footage of the suspect, is the right impression. He redid the video in 2022 with about a 7,000% increase in quality, but this time around, he was doing it live with unaccompanied folk guitar, which I’ve never been terribly fond of. So, both are below: choose whichever you like, or listen to both and tell me I’m full of shit, or don’t listen to either of them and tell me I’m full of shit anyway because, hey, it’s the webbernets and exactly the place for that.
Next up we have Tim Minchin, who’s been featured here once before, and I really should have more of his stuff, but somehow his appearances and videos thereof never seem to cross my path, and I have to go looking for them instead. His song, taken from a live performance in Australia, is, “White Wine in the Sun,” and please note: Each year, proceeds from the sales of this song at this time of year go to benefit those on the autism spectrum, so please feel free to download it from the service of your choice.
[There are several versions of this out there too, but this one appeared to have no intrusive horseshit YouTube ads – now you know why I host my own stuff on Vimeo.]
That’s all for now, so I’ll leave you with a heartfelt Happy Holidays, for whatever holiday you choose to celebrate or indeed if you celebrate none at all and can thus consider that a holiday thereby creating all sorts of logical issues. I’m glad you’re here to read this, and I’ll provide something more soon. Ish.
So, with today being the winter solstice and thus having the fewest daylight minutes of the year, we celebrate that the days are now getting longer from here, as it’s typically put, which goes to show you how we can’t handle our own language; they days are the same length that they always are, except for a few picoseconds, but the axial tilt of the planet means the ratio of daylight to not-daylight is the widest it can get, in favor of the not-daylight. Back in June we had the same thing only in the other direction, but I never feel like recognizing that the daylight hours are now losing their commanding lead over darkness.
Anyway, for this momentous event (and because I’ve been busy with many other things and thus not photographing much of anything,) I tried to see if there were any sunspots visible, but by the time I recalled that I should be trying, the sky was hazing up and the sun had descended behind the trees – see that bit about axial tilt, above. So I opted for cheating, and went back into the folders for a pic taken on the summer solstice back on June 21st. And couldn’t find any. In any folders. Did I really go for that day in the summer and not shoot anything? I mean, nothing at all for several days on either side, even. Was I doing something then?
Finally, I found one, and it helped answer the question.
In the Space folder I found this, only it was from the 22nd instead. Just a quick grab shot early in the morning through The Girlfriend’s Sprog’s window, after waking up on their couch – the crescent moon with Venus tagging along, but this was one of only two attempts not marred by motion blur due to slooooww shutter speeds in the dim twilight. What it indicates, however, is that I’d traveled back to the old Less Stately Walkabout Manor to do some work, preparatory to selling it, an overnight trip so I had time to get everything done – I couldn’t sleep there because there wasn’t any furniture and I’d had enough of inflatable mattresses for a while. The summer solstice (the day before) was spent partially on the road, but mostly painting and fixing odds and ends. No wonder I had no pics.
Anyway, my head’s been bothering me all day, so this is what we get. Enjoy the holiday and looking forward to the sun rising earlier and staying up longer, like… well, not a teenager, that’s for sure, nor some old fart. Who rises early and stays up late? Probably those insufferable ‘go-getters’ or people relying on narcotics. No analogy that works well here. But enjoy it anyway.
… what, five days ago, when the temperature dropped to -6°c overnight, and got barely above freezing during the day?
Yeah.
It was 21° as I took these this afternoon. North Carolina, man…
Six yellow-bellied sliders (Trachemys scripta scripta) had piled onto the limited real estate of Turtle Island to enjoy the sun, showing that they’re adept at detecting the air temperature even while the water temperature was still recovering from its ice shield just a few days back. Are they triggered by the sunlight to at least poke their noses up and test the air? I admit, I’m impressed.
Not five meters away, a floating log was hosting its own collection.
Seven here, in this case eastern painted turtles (Chrysemys picta picta,) all less than a third of the mass of the sliders – their belly plastrons were roughly the size of my palm. Waste no time.
We go in a little closer.
Actually, as I uploaded this I realized I was wrong: you can see by the stripes on the face of the ‘taller’ one on the left that it’s another slider instead. I’m pretty sure all the rest are painteds.
The Carolina anoles (Anolis carolinensis) had also wasted no time, and were scurrying around in many places, but I caught this one basking on the grape arbor we erected late this summer.
We used some old nylon rope as the stringers, but we’ll probably replace it before spring. The anoles, however, have already expressed their delight in this simple structure, and will probably lose their shit when the grapes leaf out and the insects are plentiful. Since I ended up evicting several that were sleeping in the matted leaves in the base of the pots that held the grape plants all summer (while we waited for the cable provider to get around to patching the line across the yard, right alongside the arbor – you can piece the story together from there,) I’m glad that they’re seeing the benefits of the arbor at least.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going for a swim…
As we come to the penultimate Estate Find for the year, I have to admit that, while a few of them were punted or downright skipped, there was still a surprising amount of new finds, observations, behaviors, and so on. And here we add another new species, at least to me and to the blog:
My exposure to the varied duck species of North America has been fairly limited, and so I wasn’t in the habit of looking for the subtle differences displayed here until they became a little more obvious at that one point in the video. My go-to guide for avian identification has been The Sibley Guide to Birds, which has easily been the best desk reference that I’ve ever had; it features not just male and female plumage differences, but juvenile to adult and seasonal as well, plus range and calls. Nonetheless, it remained a little inconclusive in this case since the illustrations didn’t fully display that color difference between the cheeks and crown, while at the same time they enhanced the body feather variations, which are normally quite muted. Luckily, I had a variety of images that I could refer to, such as this sequence:
The duck to be identified in the back, with a known female mallard in the front, both flapping their wings simultaneously in close proximity and thus allowing both comparison and a glimpse at feathers normally hidden. We see the black duck has no with banding alongside the deep blue secondary feathers on the wings, and has white underwings; no other species has these two traits together. Leg and bill color and relative size also helps, and finding more images of the species online, including at CornellLabs’s All About Birds site. That said, it is far, far easier to flip through the pages of the Sibley Guide to compare plumage among many species.
We’re curious to see what else might be showing up in the future. Neighbors down at the opposite end of The Bayou have seen hooded mergansers in the past, and I’ve seen a flotilla of North American ruddy ducks not too far away, though those are certainly more inclined to open water. We’ve got one more Estate Find to go, though this really isn’t setting any limit on what can be added, just what I can still feature within the year. We’ll see, won’t we?
Another video here, which makes this the [insert accurate count here] one for the year – it looks like I’m branching out into videography more than a little bit. And yes, more of the same subjects, but listen: I’ve spent very long periods of time featuring insects and spiders and lizards and worse, so at least we’re dealing with something cute right now.
Semi-routinely, when we go down after dark to distribute corn for the morning duck frenzy, at least two nutrias are around, and amusingly, it’s at least one of the bebbies that comes up immediately upon hearing (or seeing, or smelling) the corn hit the pond edge – I have another clip that will show here eventually, when I have more of the night video to compile. Meanwhile, one of the stills, timed for the duck in the background:
What we find curious is how little the adults seem to guide the behavior of the chillun. While any adults tend to maintain a distance as we’re near the pond edge or when we make any noise at all, at least two of the juveniles will boldly come up, though they can’t really see us in the headlamps’ glare, and start feeding onshore within five meters of us, sometimes even while we converse quietly. Which is weird, because I’ve spooked them by moving my arms and creating the faintest of noises from the nylon jacket rubbing against itself, but talking seems to bother them less. Go figure.
And one of the stills that I got between clips, as the fourth juvenile comes ashore in the gap between the others. There is definitely one of them that seems much more wary than the others, and perhaps a tad smaller – that part’s hard to tell. Are these all the same litter? Not sure – they don’t dependably appear together at all, and in fact, it was a week or more before we were sure there were more than two. It’s also rare that both adults appear together. We’re still piecing together the observations as we go.
As intimated earlier, I did get out to do a few shots while the temperatures remained in the ‘frigid’ class, eventually peaking above freezing, but not by a lot. And while we’ve already well surpassed the record for images uploaded during a year, we’ll take any opportunity to blast it out of the water, because why not? The ducks were not only conspicuously absent for nearly the entire daylight hours, they apparently hadn’t made a run on the corn (which did happen right before sunset, however.) But one of the red-shouldered hawks (Buteo lineatus) has been hanging around hopefully, taking a chance whenever possible to stake out the yard until we actually see them there and chase them off – to the best of our knowledge, they have neither succeeded nor attempted to snag a duck meal, but we know they’re thinking about it.
This gives a small indication of why they can be hard to see, and even harder to photograph as well – they prefer to sit well into the canopy, even when there are no leaves or needles, to obscure themselves close to the trunks, but we’re fairly familiar with what the trees look like in the backyard now, and usually spot the ‘clump’ where there hadn’t been one before.
This one allowed me to get almost directly underneath:
Soon after this frame, the hawk vented forth a few quiet squeaks in protest before flying off to another location on the opposite side of the pond, but at least I got around far enough for a catchlight.
The pond surface wasn’t completely frozen over, but close, and there were no indications that overnight visitors had been churning up the water to prevent this, either, so they apparently wrapped it up before the night wore on too far; we’d seen a pair of juvie nutrias cruising around when we distributed the corn at about 8 PM last night and opted to leave them to it. But the evidence that they’ve been visiting routinely is around, in a lot of places, if you know what to look for.
That’s a small ‘knee’ of one of the bald cypress trees, not far out into the pond, showing that something has been gnawing on it. Now, I believe we’ve seen this behavior from both the nutrias and the beavers, so this is inconclusive, though I think we’d lean towards nutria because they seem to only want plants and softer stuff, so this seems to be as far as they go with hardwoods. And while this wasn’t very far out into the water from the edge, another wasn’t at all.
Yeah, that’s my foot alongside, showing that whoever accomplished this was right up on shore – which still doesn’t prove it was a nutria, though slightly more likely. Over on Turtle Island, however, the evidence was almost entirely in favor of beavers.
You can see the various small saplings truncated sharply, a habit that nutrias never display. And since we’ve seen a beaver feeding among the nutria bebbies one night, it’s safe to say they’re the culprit here.
Quite close to Turtle Island was something a bit curious, too.
Something broke through the ice, and from the underside as well, right alongside shore. And another, a couple of meters away.
Both of these holes were roughly 30cm in diameter, so big enough for an adult beaver or nutria. I looked hard, and in no location on the frozen surface was any further evidence shown – no other breaks, no rough areas where the water had been stirred up just before freezing, and no apparent entry point. Plus, this wasn’t an area that I’d seen either species visiting, and no evidence of them having come ashore for any plants thereon. Curious.
While out, I checked on the greenhouse, which was getting nicely toasty under the administrations of bright sunlight, and the anoles within were showing no recognition that it was still below freezing outside.
There was no reason for them to be hesitant, after all – my glasses immediately fogged over as soon as I stepped inside.
Even without the sunlight, the heater within is set to keep things above 10°c, though last night it was fighting and only managed about 7° – that’s enough to send the anoles into some tight shelter to conserve their body heat, only to pop back out as soon as it was a bit warmer.
Meanwhile, the potted Japanese maple therein showed a couple of early scouts for the spring as well.
Those are the colors of new leaves, right up on the very top, with some red buds visible down below. Funny to see this early, and I expect the bulk of them will still wait a couple of months to pop out, but a good sign at least.
And finally, I’ve been monitoring the almond tree to see when its last leaf will fall; it’s not there yet.
It stayed impressively green until after the second frost, when it finally started showing signs that it recognized the colder weather, but even with these temperatures and some strong wind gusts, it’s still hanging onto some leaves in a fashionable manner – I’m impressed.
And that was it for me – I’d exhausted both the most obvious photo subjects and my tolerance for the cold, which hasn’t been very high the past couple of days. But hey, what is that, eleven photos? I’m still keeping things moving here. And while I doubt this is the coldest that it’ll get this winter, especially with such an early start for this latitude, it would be nice if it was, wouldn’t it?
We need these right now – it got down to -6°c last night, and is only slightly better as I type this.
I took these only a couple of days back to illustrate how confused the Key lime trees (Citrus × aurantiifolia) seem to be, producing new blossoms right alongside fruit that was still ripening. Make up your mind!
This is in the greenhouse of course, and the heater within struggled last night but kept things at an acceptable temperature – there are still some limes and better than half of the lemons waiting for peak ripeness. By the way, if you’re wondering about the color, Key limes turn a bit yellowish when they’re ripe, looking like a half-ripe lemon or perhaps a cross between lemons and the ‘classic’ limes you find in the grocery stores. This color means they’re very close to peak.
There’s ice out on the pond, and I may get out there for some pics a little later on, when I’ve mentally prepared myself enough. My sinuses respond poorly to the cold, so there’s a certain level of discomfort to pain in going out in these conditions. I’m expecting great accolades for any images that result from that…
I can’t believe I missed these clips when putting together the compilation. Well, okay, I can, since I forgot that I attempted to get some underwater footage of their zoomies with the Ricoh WG-60 waterproof camera, but the pond water was far too murky for that. Anyway, a brief interlude:
Listening to The Girlfriend’s baby talk is still amusing…
… that one of these days I’ll break my streak of bad luck in attempting to capture meteors. That’s how odds work, right?
Anyway, the Geminids meteor shower is peaking over the next few nights, specifically Saturday at about 10 PM EST (or 0300 UTC Sunday morning,) while the moon will be dark, so if you have clear skies, go for it and show me up. According to informed sources, it’s supposed to be a good year for Geminids.
Not only that, but there’s a campaign to observe meteor impacts on the moon itself, since it will be a waning crescent rising in the early morning (1:25 AM EDT tonight/tomorrow morning, 2:23 AM Saturday night/Sunday morning,) so if you want to participate, check out this link. There’s a chance I might have the ability to do some lunar video, since at present, the tracking motor seems to be working correctly; the initial tests and timing of the rotation seem reasonably accurate, anyway. I was busy with video last night and so did not perform an acid test, and tonight might be too cloudy to allow it. We’ll see, I guess.
While I’m here, several days back there was a claim of significant sunspot activity, naturally occurring while we were under steady overcast and rain conditions. Within two days, it cleared to a decent degree in the morning, but my first attempt was while the sun was still peeking through bare winter branches.
No problem – I could wait for it to rise high enough. Unfortunately, the clouds couldn’t, and they were already blocking the sun before it even cleared the trees – not completely, but enough that seeing any sunspots was out of the question. However, as the day wore on, the clouds wore thin at sporadic times, and for one of those, I snuck in and snagged a couple of frames in the thirty seconds or so that I had, even with wisps crossing the face of the sun.
Yeah, that’s not exactly ‘significant’ sunspot activity, though granted, this was a few days past the alert. And apparently, in the very early days of the activity, Australia got bombarded with the effects of the solar flare that accompanied the first of the spots, so initially it was pretty active, at least.
[A note on sunspot and solar flares: the sun rotates, and is a significant distance away. This means that the radiation from solar flares doesn’t come straight out from the flare, or any spot, but is affected by precession, as well as taking a little time to get here since it’s not traveling at the speed of light. So spots and flares that appear directly towards us are not likely to send anything our way, but ones just appearing around the western ‘limb’ might, and this seems to have been the case. My photos were taken December 7th, while Australia got affected back on the 1st.]
Anyway, go chase some Geminids, and good luck!
