The backyard is great fuel for the imagination, but it is also calming.It is not difficult to find a peacefulness here. I like to see the wind rippling across the water, and the reflection of light laid down like a path. One of the sounds I miss from growing up is the wind through a bamboo grove. It is a different quality from wind through any other trees, I think….
In the backyard, across the water, there is a strip of land wide enough to act as an excellent buffer between this and the neighborhood next door. I would go exploring there but am afraid of Alligators! Alligators are abundant here, but they do something called brummation, which is a reduction in their metabolic activity. So, they disappear. The last one I saw was several weeks ago. Since I don’t…
It warmed up considerably today. Perhaps in the low 70s and, as yesterday, the backyard surprised me with the assemblage of color and variety. My default when taking pictures of birds is to go for the video. This is more reliable since I can be sure I have gotten the images. With stills, I have to try to adjust the camera rapidly, particularly because here in the backyard there are…
Nature is conspiring to delight me. The person above is the Eastern Bluebird. This morning, a little brown bird which I believe to be the Eastern Phoebe, darted across the lawn. He took up residence in a tree outside the screen and stayed there. His coloring is such that I have difficulty photographing him well. These birds are really about an inch or two high, and of course are usually…
I injudiciously chased down these two while trying to appear not to be doing so. They hang out a bit further down the water from us, because there is an old woman who feeds them. The white of the female is a bit boring, but I do love the look of the male. The colors are so varied. I remember my first encounter with mallards. It was a DIY quilted…
Today, there is this: I actually quite like this one. This is a fresh water clam. The food of the limpkin, seen in yesterday’s post. This bird gets quite energetic in it’s consumption. It vigorously pries open the clam and wrestle’s the creature free. Occasionally, it must lift it’s long beak and pound the shell so it splits open. The thing about the commitment to write a post every day…
These two birds are a study in contrast. I have better pictures of them both, but none taken today. The one of the left is a tri-colored heron, the one on the right a limpkin. This little inlet sits on the other side of the shore, and they hung out over there for much of the day. The limpkin I would call very successful. He’s very deliberate and spends a…
I knelt down on the boardwalk, my camera hanging from my neck. “Look,” I exclaimed with excitement. “There really is something there.” There, with steam rising from it, and the sulphuric odor suffusing the air, there was life there at the water’s edge. This was on a walk among the glaciers in Yellowstone National Park. The brochures were right, it seemed. Even in this inhospitable environment, the very crust of…
What if I wrote a post every day for one month? What if I recorded things which inspired or moved me? What if I added a photo everyday? What if I didn’t know what I was doing? What if it were hard? What if it taught me something? What if I learned? What if I became more me? What if a year from now this was a valuable record of…