… it was just a matter of time.
The first reappearance (after a long hiatus) of the wood ducklings (Aix sponsa) came just as we were running out the door, because of course. Then the barest of video clips that evening, before it rained for about 16 hours. Once it cleared, however, things picked up, and by this past Monday, we were seeing them just about every hour, cycling through.
A little
You can expect to find things like this, if you’re looking around. Two short clips, one from last night, one from, damn, ten days ago – I’d been hoping to get some more to go along with it, but there’s been no further sign as yet.
A note about the toads. This isn’t actually mating, since they do external fertilization: the female finds a body of water
These are just a few recent images that demonstrate one of those factors I struggle with, in this case, trying for ‘that portrait’ of a wood duck. And I’m doing this because, while I just now got a video clip of some other species entirely to feature, I also have background noise that will prevent doing the voiceover for a while. So we have this instead.
Anyway, the wood duck (or
As intimated, I’ve been deeply involved in numerous projects here, keeping me away from blogging and not a lot of photography, either. So let’s catch up a little with pics from the past week or so.
We’ll start with an update on the bebbehs, the latest crop of nutria (Myocastor coypus) young, which have now expanded to five.
It’s rare to see them all at once,
Now it’s time to let it go. And we do so with the month-end abstract of course. March left us with two, to split between all of us. Evenly, so don’t be claiming more than your share. They look like this:
This wouldn’t have been half as good without the stippled coloration, which I believe is a breast feather from a male wood duck –
So, this is the other video that I’ve been trying to finish up, the notorious one mentioned in previous posts. It did not help in the slightest that, before getting the chance to edit together the clips, I continued to add more to them.
But yeah, the discoveries on the property keep right on happening. It’s certainly not boring in any way. Well, at least not for us…
You can see that
I’m not doing terribly well on cleaning out the backlog, partially because there’s no real subject/theme among most of the pics, so I’m just throwing up a couple for the time being, recent avian images.
A few days back, The Girlfriend and I did a pass through Goose Creek State Park in the late morning, turning up surprisingly little – the place seemed almost
I have a small collection of the same subject from two consecutive days, but the best images were the first and tapered off a bit from there, so we’re doing them mostly in reverse order.
Four or five days ago (depending on when I actually post this – it’s 11 PM right now,) the day dawned quite foggy, and I looked out at the pond and saw practically nothing. No, it wasn’t quite
The other day (well, eight days ago) when The Girlfriend and I were out doing various property tasks, she came across three nearly identical finds that remain a small mystery, one I may be attempting to solve as I find the means to do so. To wit:
Right in one of the paths through the less-traveled sections of the property, she came up with this, the carapace of, most likely, a common
The thick snow and the frozen pond caused a near=total cessation of involvement at the pond edge – no ducks, no geese, no nutrias, no beavers. Just some grackles and blackbirds. We dropped some corn on the edges and across the ice a little, just in case, but even the trail that someone had blazed through the ice had refrozen completely over.
I witnessed a quick pass yesterday around midday,
