I have not been staying on top of the various April holidays, and today (which is indeed Earth Day) is rainy and blergh out there, so we’ll have a variety of photos obtained earlier that I finally got around to editing. Let’s see, let’s see, what have I been taking recently?
Over at the neighborhood pond, a trio of yellow-bellied sliders (Trachemys scripta scripta)
… and Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
Now that I have that earworm firmly established, let’s get to the pics.
A few days back we got a ton of water dumped on us here in central NC, like most of the country I believe, right after temperatures had gotten above 25°c, then dropped precipitously (sorry) during and after the rains. Yesterday, with the sun out and the temperature
Yes, another month is kaput, and that means a photo dedicated solely to this, because it’s a tradition on the blog now and we all know how important such things are. That’s right, not at all even slightly a little bit. But we’re still gonna do it, as if extra-terrestrials aren’t watching us and shaking their cephalothoraxes.
Yeah, we’ve had similar before,
As mentioned earlier, Friday’s outing also produced some sunset colors – more so than normal, but that’s not hard to do in this region of NC, at least. Somebody set the ‘Clearing’ setting for the sky to ‘Sunset’ and so the skies are typically wiped free of clouds at about that time. This time around, the cache was a bit slow in emptying and there remained
While we had several warm spells far earlier than normal, interspersed with some overnight lows dropping below freezing, I think spring is getting a toehold now, and the critters and plants are on schedule. The Insoluble Mr Bugg and I went down to Jordan Lake Friday for a late afternoon and sunset shoot, and there were a few subjects to be found, though it’s not quite the active season yet.
Widely mixed, even.
So Buggato and I had another outing yesterday, once again to Jordan Lake because, while plants are indeed budding out around here, full bloom is a ways off meanwhile, we’re keeping an eye on bird activity at the lake. And in some cases, it was active.
While seeing double-crested cormorants (Nannopterum auritum) is fairly easy down there, yesterday
Today got as warm as 24°c, so I took the opportunity to return to Jordan Lake to see what could be seen. The spot where we were seeing the eagles last week was almost empty, save for a few gulls and cormorants, and I only fired off a handful of frames trying for something
As I mentioned that morning, on Wednesday Mr Bugg and I had an outing to Jordan Lake, seeing what kind of activity was about as spring peeked in. Granted, it seems way too early for spring, and it is, but it didn’t feel that way, and the first signs were there. This post will all be about birds – with one exception, just for balance.
Things started slow. The rampant activity that I’d
N 35.796027° W 79.011323° Google Earth Placemark
This one’s kind of missing the point, I’ll admit it – it’s not showing you what you can achieve at an exotic locale (like I’ve even been to one,) because this is the kind of thing that can be captured anywhere, and this particular frame came from not too far away from where I sit right now.
But, it does say
That’s right, it’s the winter solstice today, or technically it was at 21:48 UTC, the very time when the sun sank as low as… no, that’s not exactly right, it was actually when the Earth tilted… no, that’s not really right either, it was when the south pole of the Earth was leaned as close to the sun as it can be, the very thing that makes winter in the
