Visibly different, part 16

Al Denelsbeck

brown pelican Pelecanus occidentalis silhouetted in sky near sun
This one I can remember fairly well, despite having no context or surroundings. This was in Florida, Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge to be exact, taken while my brother was visiting. It was a grab shot as I spotted the brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) cruising overhead, and including the sun was intentional. This was with the Sony F717 loaner camera in late afternoon on a slightly hazy day, so there wasn’t a lot of color to work with.

But it’s pretty similar to the next, taken 15 (and not quite a half) years later.

brown pelican Pelecanus occidentalis banking with wingtips against sun
Seriously, not a lot different between them, though the latter is definitely superior. This does not come from greater experience, more planning, or anything of that crafty nature, though it might have benefited from using Full Sun white balance instead of Auto like the previous, retaining the color register of the early morning sun. Nor was this a planned revisit of the earlier image. I was simply tracking the pelican in the hopes of a close approach when it banked near the sun. The Canon 30D definitely did not have the shutter lag of the F717, and chances are I was anticipating this more, but other than that it was all chance differences. More than anything, this is just showing the unintentional similarity of two images shot years apart.

It’s that April busy season

Al Denelsbeck

Yes, indeed, like every year, we’re closing in on three principle events within April, and unlike some of the other ‘events’ that pop up around this time of year, these are not at all mythological.

First off, we’re already within the Lyrids Meteor Shower, though it peaks on the 21st-22nd – basically, go out whenever you get clear enough skies and give it a shot. On the peak nights, the moon will be rising just as the meteor activity is due to increase, not ideal, and it’s a waning gibbous moon so, still noticeably bright. The general rule is, after midnight the spot on Earth where you’re standing starts to face into the direction of Earth’s travel around the sun, which increases the likelihood of seeing meteors. This year, we have a little window around that time when the moon either hasn’t risen yet or has just risen and not gotten too high or bright, and the sun is as far from orbiting satellites as it can get, so our best chances of seeing something fall in there – weather cooperating, of course. Since we still haven’t gotten completely past this ridiculous tendency for overnight temperatures to drop to inexcusable levels, it might be less than comfortable out there, but hey, I didn’t plan this.

I have yet to capture anything even remotely noteworthy, despite my attempts, but I have to note that, to the best of my knowledge, neither did anyone else anyplace within a few hundred kilometers of my location during any of the storms that I tried observing. What I’m saying is, there’s no proof that I suck.

April 22nd is also Earth Day, so plan your visit there early because it’s sure to get crowded – scientists predict damn near everyone will be someplace on Earth that day. It’s a good time to see just how far you can get on strictly human power (well, camels are okay too I suppose,) or whether you can go the entire day without extraneous electricity, or things like that – trust me, I’m not getting preachy myself because I do too much stuff on a computer, even when I watch no TV myself; The Girlfriend and I watch an episode of Bob’s Burgers over dinner, three to four times a week, and that’s all the TV for me, but the computer, well… We’ll see if I can shut it down and leave it down for at least the day.

April 24th is the – are you ready for this? – 32nd anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, still going strong up there. Most people have at least heard of the newly-launched James Webb Space Telescope (“Webb” or “JWST” are fine,) and a lot think it’s Hubble’s replacement, which isn’t exactly true. Webb is geared towards more refined observations than Hubble, largely in the infra-red spectrum, so even though its main mirror, and thus its resolving power, are several times greater, it’ll be looking at different things.

[Sidetrack here for trivia that has nothing to do with Hubble. Webb is ‘parked’ at an imaginary point in space called Lagrange 2, or L2 – exactly opposite the Earth from the sun, so it will never receive any direct sunlight, and at such a distance that the gravitational pulls of both will help it remain there in orbit, self-stabilized. The instruments onboard need to be extremely cold to operate, so this is the best of the options available. It sits about 1.5 million kilometers out from Earth, about 1% of the distance between the Earth and the sun, but almost four times farther than the moon, and more than 2,600 times as far as Hubble. Unlike the Hubble, we’re not going to see it with any backyard telescope, especially since it perpetually remains in Earth’s shadow.]

Anyway, Hubble’s still kicking and can be spotted on certain nights – Stellarium, once again, is your bud.

HST images of protoplanetary disk AB Aurigae b
Credit: NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)

The image seen here shows a protoplanetary ‘blob,’ essentially a forming string of planets, in very wide orbit around the star AB Aurigae. Courtesy of Hubble, we’re seeing a planet (likely a string of them) forming around a star 531 light years away. Slick, right?

Fulfilled that obligation

Al Denelsbeck

I’m here to tell you from personal experience how nice it feels to accomplish something, and coincidentally, this ties in with the holiday, because today is Finally Make A Bare Minimum Advance Towards Goals Day. Yep, it’s the day when we get something done, no matter how minimal, that we can feel proud of instead of the usual background embarrassment over ongoing complacency.

For my part, it’s illustrating a little more behavior from my local and easy-to-observe photographic subjects, to wit, the Carolina anoles (Anolis carolinensis.) This actually occurred three days ago, but I hung onto it until now to make celebrating the holiday even easier; otherwise I might have had to accomplish something further today, the thought of which is more than a little galling. So let’s see what I got:

Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis shedding skin on fence
While doing a bunch of gardening, now that spring may actually be here (or maybe not,) I was marching back and forth among the sprawling expanse of Walkabout Estates, including multiple trips through the gate between the anterior and posterior spreads, spotting anoles more than a couple of times – they were attempting to enjoy the brilliant sun and pleasant temperatures and would probably have preferred not to be seeing me so much, but the gardening is almost as much for their benefit as it is for mine. Well, some portion of it anyway – a non-zero percentage at least. But a little later on, I glanced over and found this. This is how an anole sheds its skin, which happens several times a year – not like we do in tiny flakes, nor how a snake does all at once in one distinct piece. It’s pretty decrepit-looking, really. While we’re here, I’ll point out the curved shadow on the fence just beneath the lizard; this is the shadow of my own head, carefully maintained down low where the sudden eclipsing of the sun might have spooked the lizard off. We can go in a little bit closer.

Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis shedding skin on fence
The lizard was well aware of me closing in, but I moved as gently as possible and kept the noise to a minimum, managing not to disturb it. The chances are fairly good that this was one of those that I was seeing earlier that day, though no signs of the impending shed were noticed, and it’s also fairly likely that this was the one that I’d caught sleeping two days previous, since this was a bare meter from the location on the gardenia bush; I was leaning into/through the bush to get these frames.

This is the kind of thing that I want to capture more of, illustrating the various life habits of the species that I pursue, and the fact that it doesn’t happen often suggests that I should be spending a lot more time ‘stalking,’ observing as much as I can from enough distance that they don’t feel too threatened by my presence. This isn’t that difficult with the lizard species, since a few minutes of motionlessness is enough to convince them that the threat is gone – I just haven’t been dedicating the time to it. As for seeing more, such as through video, there really wasn’t anything more to see for this one: the anole was simply basking, probably helping the skin to dry out, and said skin would eventually be brushed away with passage down the fence and among the leaf litter, at least from what I’ve seen so far. Capturing the start would be nice, but admittedly a matter of blind luck. Still, it’s a goal.

What are those goals, you ask? There’s always a list, for any given species, and among them for the anoles is:

  • Foraging, and capturing meals
  • Mating
  • Giving birth (highly unlikely – this probably takes place in deep concealment)
  • Territorial displays and encounters
  • First emerging from shelter
  • Avoiding (or not) predators
  • Anything else that illustrates their typical behavior

    • Most of that would be ideal for video, of course, which requires adequate light and usually having the tripod already set up, because handheld macro video is far too shaky and nausea-inducing. So, not quite as casual as I implied above, but it’s also not going to happen unless I make it happen, so I need to kick myself in the ass to make it happen. Good thing that I’ve already observed the holiday for today though, so I can kick back instead and revel in the sense of progress.

    Just because, part 46

    Al Denelsbeck

    unidentified water plants against reflected sun
    An outing to Jordan Lake yesterday was remarkably unproductive, but I managed a few frames of minor merit, and we have one here (demonstrating that my definition of “merit” isn’t influenced by Merriam, Wagnalls, Webster, or Funk – and no, that’s not where “funky” comes from, and you probably don’t want to know the actual etymology of that.) These might be some variety of lily pads, or they might not, but I’m not looking them up – the purpose hereof is just the aesthetics (again, mine.) The initial light angle made their shapes stand out, but shifting around a bit to put the sun’s reflection in the immediate surroundings made them more surreal. Should I have left the stem at the top out? Should I have waited to see if they would flower? Should I have stayed home and cleaned the office? These questions shall remain completely disregarded.

    This image is a little too similar to what will (likely, unless I get better in the interim) become the end-of-the-month abstract – another image that I shot yesterday – but that’s two weeks away and you’ll forget about this one by then. In fact, you probably already have. If you exist outside of my fevered imagination at all.

    Some night, anyway

    Al Denelsbeck

    I was initially going to say these were from last night, but it’s getting late and some idiot decided the date should change at midnight rather than, say, seven AM. Whatever – they were shot at night, and obviously not right now. Good enough.

    While I’m still leery of the temperature dropping to something inexcusable again, it’s been warm even overnight, and so scoping out the sprawling acreage of Walkabout Estates has been showing more than just dead leaves. This next bit, however, was largely like this many hours earlier in the morning, when I noticed that another of the Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis) egg cases had hatched. But something was wrong.

    newborn Chinese mantids Tenodera sinensis still hanging from ootheca egg case
    Normally, they’d be scattering away to the surrounding branches and plants, but something seemed to have kept far too many of them hanging right beneath the egg case, even when they appear to have separated from their supporting lines properly and show a color change to their chitin. It was very odd. Some were visibly running around, but too many seemed to be stuck or trapped right there. Nothing, so far, has seemed to make sense – I would easily have believed a sudden drop in temperature, but we didn’t come anywhere near a dangerous drop for them, so I’m stymied. Like I said, this was hours after first sighting them, without looking much different.

    Someone else noticed this too, and was taking advantage of it, visible above off to the right if you’re looking closely and recognize the anachronistic body shape. In a moment, it revealed itself more distinctly.

    unidentified crab spider Thomisidae making off with incapacitated newborn Chinese mantis Tenodera sinensis
    This opportunistic but lazy crab spider was helping itself to one of the newborns, which showed no sign of movement itself – this might have indicated that it was already dead, or simply that it had succumbed to the spider’s venom. Regardless, that’s two egg cases down and very little to show for them – here’s hoping at least one of the three others produces an abundance of hardy newborns.

    [Technically, there are five others, but two of them don’t look too viable and I suspect they may be from a previous year. The outside ‘foam’ is quite tough and long-lasting, so I can’t say for sure.]

    In doing yard work, I moved a bunch of old window panes that we’d replaced last summer and disturbed no less than seven juvenile green treefrogs (Hyla cinerea.) Those that allowed it, I moved to another safe location, but a few found my handling unsavory and made their escape nearby. That evening, within a meter or so of where the windows had been, one perched atop a fencepost and gave me the stinkeye.

    juvenile green treefrog Hyla cinerea perched atop fencepost at night
    I suspect it was simply waiting to see what else I was gonna fuck up, obviously knowing humans enough by now not to expect anything better from them. Or am I reading too much into this?

    We’ll make this a shorter one, because there isn’t a lot to say that hasn’t been said before, but I’ll show off another find, quite visible in the headlamp as I toured the yard.

    Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis snoozing overnight on gardenia bush
    A slightly-portly-looking adult Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis) was asleep in one of the gardenia bushes, and might have escaped attention (naaahhhh) if it hadn’t been flashing its white belly in my direction. As I maneuvered close, it opened one eye and regarded me dispassionately for a moment before going back to sleep, permitting a nice broadside perspective. This let me keep the entire body in focus, which you’ll see in better detail if you click on that image. Notice the faint color shift right behind the head, which may mean something but I don’t speak Anole.

    Hey, look! It’s still Wednesday, so this really was last night. Lost connection twice while typing this, too. Boy, making deadlines like that should be worth something…

    Visibly different, part 15

    Al Denelsbeck

    view down from bridge over waterfall in Watkins Glen, NY
    This one came about when I was running through my slides and realized that I had a comparison image – it was unintentional, but fell into place. What we see here is a view down from a bridge over a small waterfall/torrent in Watkins Glen, New York, during a visit in 2006. Watkins Glen is the name of the town and the big scenic gorge that cuts down through the bedrock towards Seneca Lake, with excellent access for sightseers. I’d been meaning to get back there and do the place justice for some time, but the day that I had available was overcast and a little rainy, so while it kept the crowds at bay, it didn’t lend itself to good photos. The wet rock stood out perhaps a little better, but of course increased contrast significantly, rendering many of the slides that I took that day almost into monochrome.

    [A word of background: I grew up near this in central New York, and visited a couple of times but long before I was ever doing photography. After moving away, I didn’t get back up to NY to visit family too frequently and was often constrained in available time when I did, plus the fact that Watkins Glen is roughly an hour from where I was staying, to say nothing of the multiple hours hiking up the paths that run alongside, so arranging the trip wasn’t a simple thing. I was more than a little chagrined to find the weather so crappy when I finally did get the trip in order, but so it goes.]

    We follow that with a few years ago in 2019, when I eventually got another chance to return.

    ferns about cascade in Watkins Glen, New York
    Same bridge, same perspective, but this time I found a foreground item to use. Plus the conditions were a lot better, though the flow is clearly reduced. So credit to the better lighting at least, and I think the latter was later in the year (summer instead of spring, if I recall correctly,) and so more likely to find a fern of this nature to begin with. But a part of it was just finding the fern sprouting from the vertical sides of the bridge and realizing that I could make it a subject; it was even better when I realized that the steps in the rocks could accentuate the edges of the fern leaves, if I positioned myself carefully – yes, this was fully intentional. In this case, the reduced flow worked in the image’s favor by even providing those lines to begin with. We lose the depth of the descending falls of course, so the conditions of the gorge are not displayed here, but I’m good with this particular tradeoff.

    If you want another perspective, it’s the same bridge in the second image here, from the same excursion, and you can thus see the number of people visiting when the weather’s right. It’s worth the visit, and really, the Finger Lakes region of central New York is very scenic, so if you have the chance and haven’t done so already, check it out. My big regret is that, with last year’s visit when The Girlfriend was finally along, we didn’t have a lot of time to check out more spots.

    It’s still cool

    Al Denelsbeck

    It’s kinda funny how abruptly your perspective may change. I’ve been getting reminders of what today is the anniversary of all week, and to a distinct degree, I wasn’t all that motivated to recognize it – and then the rational part of my brain kicks the emotional part in the ass and tells it to go back to worrying about bad drivers.

    What I’m talking about is that today is the sixty-first anniversary of the first human in space, this being Yuri Gagarin, who happened to be Russian. Despite my relative disregard of most things somehow deemed ‘newsworthy,’ I have been well aware of Russia’s reprehensible and utterly pointless invasion of Ukraine, and have quickly gone from a general ambivalence about Russia itself to outright despising it for its actions. But this is nonsense; that actions originated with Putin, with little doubt, and while it’s unclear how much of the ruling class is of like mind, the invasion can’t really be attributed to “Russia,” any more than insisting on the value of a border wall can be attributed to “America.” Moreover, it’s neither here nor there; Gagarin’s flight happened a few generations before this ‘administration’ came into power, and even if Gagarin himself would have been wholly in favor of the invasion (he died in 1968,) it has no bearing on what he accomplished, indeed, what the entire Soviet space program accomplished.

    That’s the weird thing that we have a hard time getting over, because we want to slot people into simple categories, and I still fight with this all the time despite knowing that it’s stupid. This very trait is coming more and more into focus with the current ‘woke’ culture in America, which concentrates on playing st. peter and pronouncing final judgment on any and every public individual. But everyone is capable of both beneficial and detrimental actions, and trying to determine the ultimate tally (or much worse, considering that any detrimental action outweighs all others) is asinine and counterproductive – I went into this at length before. Gagarin might have been a closet baby-eater, or even given funds to Pat Robertson, but he was still the first human in space, and nothing takes that away from him. The point really is, it was an amazing accomplishment (with most of the credit deserved by the technicians and scientists in the Soviet space program,) and that’s what we should be recognizing: the accomplishment, not how it weighs on the grand scoreboard of anyone or anything.

    [I feel the need to point out that, of all the various ‘firsts’ regarding space programs – first human in space, first female in space, first lander on another planet, first space station, etc – the Soviets/Russians hold nearly all of them. Pay attention to how often we here in this country qualify our accomplishments with “American,” as well as clinging to our major accomplishment, landing on the moon (not a planet,) in fierce denial of how many others we came second in. It’s pretty amusing.]

    It would be easy to sidetrack onto other, semi-related topics (I know – I just deleted a couple,) but the message within this post is, regardless of anything else, 61 years ago today, humans entered space, and we’ve been advancing our knowledge and abilities ever since. It’s certainly far more worthy of notice than a National Day of Prayer or some other complete waste of effort.

    * * *

    Last year, I mentioned wearing my Vostok 1 commemorative pin for the day, and failed to follow up on that, because someone did indeed ask what it was; I was brief (no, really) but informative in my response. There’s less likelihood that I’ll run into anyone today, and the potential for a more jingoistic reaction following my explanation remains, but I can cope with that.

    Crappy lemonade

    Al Denelsbeck

    As mentioned earlier, there was an outing scheduled for the other day, that I had to postpone by two hours, and like far too many bosses on an early Friday afternoon, the sun had vanished and wasn’t coming back. It also wasn’t anywhere near as warm as it had been earlier in the week, so things weren’t looking too promising. But you know what they say about when life gives you lemons…

    It was Mason Farm Biological Reserve (again,) before most spring growth had really gotten into its swing and with a dearth of animal life. In searching for anything at all to make decent photos, I spotted a cluster of white in the woods well off the path, and traipsed over there to investigate. It turned out to be a stand of Atamasco lilies (Zephyranthes atamasco,) also called rain lilies or easter lilies – supposedly common, but I don’t recall seeing them before.

    Atamasco lilies Zephyranthes atamasco against flood bog
    Portions of the Reserve were still flooded from the recent rains, being a lowland bordering a decent creek, but the footing was largely solid. These were large for wildflowers, though about average for lilies I guess – big enough to attract attention from 30 meters off, anyway.

    cluster of Atamasco lilies Zephyranthes atamasco
    They weren’t really enough to offset the grey of the day, but they remained better than most subjects visible.

    Further on in a perpetually flooded channel, a very old fallen trunk was playing host to some opportunistic plants.

    wild violets and grasses growing from semi-submerged dead tree
    Getting back far enough to show the setting meant minimizing the already-small wild violets (Viola papilionacea,) but you know what they look like and the cluster of growth in the log was what I wanted to illustrate. There had been plenty of fresh water added not a week earlier and it still looked like that – the flow just wasn’t impressive. Small disturbances hinted at minnows within, but nothing wanted to show itself, and certainly no frogs were calling or basking.

    The only thing that showed serious activity, aside from a cluster of sparrows, was a trio of juvenile eastern grey squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) that had been tussling with one another at the mouth of a hollow trunk, though they ceased before I could get the long lens affixed. They still scampered around almost randomly, though, and I took the opportunity to shoot down the length of the log as one appeared at the far end.

    juvenile eastern grey squirrel Sciurus carolinensis peeking from opposite end of hollow log
    They yet appeared closer, and posed semi-cooperatively, though they didn’t resume the wrestling that I was hoping to get.

    pair of juvenile eastern grey squirrels Sciurus carolinensis pausing at end of hollow log
    I remained ready, and at least captured a sequence of typical sibling behavior when the closer one decided to head back down the log.

    sequence of eastern grey squirrel Sciurus carolinensis trampling over top of sibling
    There was plenty of room to go past alongside, but trampling over top was obviously more fun, though you can see evidence of a likely swat-in-the-ass bestowed by the littermate. As the youngest of four kids, you know I can relate, no matter how distant those memories are.

    But… yeah, that was about it. Not going to update the gallery pages with anything from this outing – my little roadside stand isn’t raking in enough for a comic book. It’ll get better soon enough, though.

    Because I like frustration, I guess

    Al Denelsbeck

    While going through several older slides and pages of negatives, I decided I’d sit down and catalog the various trips to Florida that I took, trying to tie rough dates to the countless images that I had. First off, let me say that what I’m referring to are the trips taken while I resided in North Carolina; I’d lived in Florida from 2002 to 2004, and did plenty of photos then but, due to numerous circumstances, very little travel across the state, so some of the images that I’m quite pleased with date from before that residency.

    I’ve never bothered with a journal or anything of the like, so reconstructing dates is usually accomplished by comparison and events that I can pin down better, such as determining the launch of a satellite during one of my earlier trips (the first, actually, since going down with my family from New York in 1978, and I can pin that down because I’d recently seen the initial, theatrical release of Star Wars*, to give a specific example.) Many of my slides have date stamps on them of when they were developed, and during those times I got my slides developed quickly, so close enough. But sometimes there is no date stamp, and of course negatives have nothing of the sort. Nor did I get the negatives into books promptly, so they’re not in chronological order, which would have helped immensely.

    Which means there’s an early trip in there that it took some time to pin down as 1995, mostly from my employment records – I’d started a new job late in 1995 and didn’t have vacation time, so it must have occurred before the switch. As for pinning down a month, well, I doubt that’s going to happen, though I know it was in the late spring through summer months, because the dive off Key Largo happened then.

    While doing all this, I was also regenerating my triptych for each, the rough path and various stops around Florida. I think most of it is accounted for, between my memory and the date stamps, but there are a few tantalizing gaps. For instance, I’m still curious about the evening photo outside Jacksonville, which is a weird place to be at that time – normally it would be morning on the return leg, because I had at least seven hours of driving ahead, so presumably I stopped someplace that night, but where? No photos that I’ve found back me up. Also, there seems to be a huge gap along the west/Gulf coast, last known photos probably being Venice Rookery. I know I’d have planned some stop between there, halfway down coast, and the cross-state leg to Jacksonville, but where? It might have been Hillsborough River State Park – I recall some stop in there being too boring (and the weather too grey and drizzly) to shoot much of anything. I’d been working from a list of birding locations downloaded off the internet for that trip, I know. Teasing my memory is another brief side leg, probably on the way down, someplace on the northeastern portion of the state, a floodplain/swamp area so thick with mosquitoes they were getting in the photos. I had thoughtfully applied the DEET repellent before leaving the car, and was cursing it because it failed to keep the little bastards at bay, but then I realized that, swarming as they were, they weren’t landing, so it worked, as long as the constant whine and vision incursions were tolerable.

    But yeah, this is the kind of stuff that I do, for reasons unknown, though I feel satisfied when I’ve pinned things down. It hasn’t been enough to make me start keeping a travel journal, though, so your call on the psychological conclusions over that.

    .
    .
    * I just feel the need to offer this little insight, since this is a trivial post anyway. When Star Wars (no, not “A New Hope” – it did not gain that subtitle until years afterward) was released, it was all done on 70mm film in big reels, with a limited number of those to distribute. Once the first theaters to receive them had finished their scheduled run, they shipped the reels off to the next theater on the list, and of course, the major cities all got them first. We did not live near a major city, so while Star Wars was released in May, it did not hit our area until August. The way that we knew what was currently playing at any given theater was through the newspaper listings – few theaters then even had a recorded message to let people know the titles and times, those came sometime in the 80s. In fact, my brother and I traveled to a little theater a couple of towns over that somehow nailed a ‘print’ (that’s industry jargon) long before it hit the larger town that we normally viewed movies within, probably the only time I ever attended that theater, and the memory of it vied with my knowledge of the town, perhaps ten years later, when I worked there and I knew there was no theater to be found – much later I determined that there had been, but closed down in the interim.

    I saw Star Wars three times in the next year, the only movie I’ve ever done that with. One of those was at a drive-in, a terrible experience in nearly all accounts, and certainly not worth it in high summer when the sun sets too late to really squeeze in two showings of a film, so the first starts before it’s dark enough to see the projection clearly – you couldn’t even read the opening crawl. Stupid idea all around.

    The other two

    Al Denelsbeck

    I told you this was coming…

    The Girlfriend and I did a brief trip to Jordan Lake a week back, just checking out conditions before it turned cold (again) – there really wasn’t much to see, and the light angle was wrong even if there had been, but I did a quick snap of the pine pollen turning the lake edge into something from a horror drama.

    pine pollen staining water and trees
    That’s not one of the mentioned subjects, it’s a bonus, like how products advertise “10% more!” than a measurement 10% less to try and sound generous without doing anything (or, you know, like everything from Apple.) Below is the intended content.

    Since she hadn’t seen it, we did the minimal hike over to check on the osprey nest, which showed no activity at all even though, to my eye, it looked like it was active.

    nest of osprey Pandion haliaetus
    We watched it for a minute or so, hoping to see someone peek their head above the rim, and of course I shot a couple of frames for closer examination when back home. But I had lowered the camera (the lens gets heavy, okay?) when I suddenly spotted someone arriving, which happened quickly because the surrounding trees prevent a decent view of the skies further from the nest. I swung the camera up hurriedly and fired off a few frames as soon as I got the bird in the viewfinder, knowing that the autofocus probably hadn’t tracked well, but hoping anyway since I had a scant second.

    osprey Pandion haliaetus arriving with nest material
    As feared, it wasn’t sharp – this is full frame and it gets no better when cropped, but at least I snagged the arrival with a good talonful of nesting material.

    Now, often enough with birds, it’s the male that builds the nest and uses it to convince the female that he’s a good mate choice, but there are variations and I’ve never confirmed this for osprey (Pandion haliaetus,) so I can’t assure you that this is the male – the plumage on this species provides no clues. This isn’t far from Walkabout Studios, but it’s not a quick jaunt either, so staking out the nest to watch for mating behavior isn’t a casual effort. Not to mention that this vantage is easily visible to the ospreys too, and may make them antsy, so brief visits are better, at least until I’m sure that eggs have been laid. But our construction foreavian went ahead and distributed their new material as we watched.

    osprey Pandion haliaetus arranging nest material
    It flew off not too long afterward though, possibly because of our presence, more likely to keep working on the nest until sunset, maybe a little of both, but we took our cue and headed back. One down.

    On the same warm day as the one daylight shot from the previous post, I also chased a Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis) around Walkabout Estates, if by, ‘around,’ you mean, ‘among a handful of fenceposts not two meters apart,’ and it’s me saying it so I do.

    Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis basking on fence
    Full confession: I only noticed it fleeing at my approach, having failed to spot it before then, but in my defense I wasn’t really looking either (I was actually watching for the reappearance of the racer, so the ground, not the fence.) But I remained motionless, knowing anoles, and sure enough it popped back into sight within a few seconds and resumed its basking location on the fence. I kept my movements slow and could get in pretty close before it started getting a little twitchy, whereupon I backed away just as slowly and let it enjoy the solar radiation. I was there to run the siphon hose anyway, so stepped outside the gate to do so. On returning, the anole was beginning to think it should be blending in better and had changed color – not too thoughtfully, given the substrate, but it’s likely instinctual anyway.

    Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis quickly turning green
    Color change in anoles is more linked to environment and mood rather than ‘camouflage,’ but if the mood change is between, ‘absorbing sunlight,’ and, ‘fleeing predation,’ the difference may be moot. There isn’t two minutes between these two frames, to give a faint idea of the timeline, though I’ve seen them change in mere seconds. That time, it was a faceoff in Florida between a Carolina anole like here, and the brown anole that’s crowding them out in that region. Both of them were doing their territorial signalling with the underchin dewlap, neither giving an inch, but then the Carolina changed from bright green to dark brown within two seconds, which prompted the brown anole (that’s actually the species name, Anolis sagrei,) to launch itself at the Carolina and start a mad chase around the tree. Curiously, the territorial coloration seem to be different, so what exactly the Carolina anole said with this change to dark brown, I couldn’t tell you.

    But my subject here had decided I wasn’t quite what it wanted to see so close. Deciding to vacate its basking spot, it slipped up the backside of the fence posts, frequently peeking out to check if I had gone.

    Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis on fencepost having just consumed an ant
    While this might be construed as commentary, I’m pretty sure my model had just consumed an ant while slinking up the fencepost, and was working it down – far be it from me to interrupt a meal. I even readied myself for video in case it spotted more ants, something that I want to capture on film, but it was not to be that day. There is little to no warning of it happening anyway – I know, because I’ve seen it a handful of times – and for something the size of ants it takes only a fraction of a second. Something like a moth, more of a mouthful, may take some effort to scarf down and present more opportunity, but I still have to be ready when it happens. Maybe someday soon I’ll do a stalking session with a longer lens, see what happens.

    That catches me up, though there’s a student outing tomorrow so we’ll see what that might produce.

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