Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
This is a wider shot of the bighorn sheep I posted a while ago, the telephoto shot made it look like I was rather close but not only was I a ways away beside the road, there was a river between us. He came down the cliff behind him to graze at the river’s edge then went back up the cliff. From my trip to Yellowstone in 2004.
I woke up at 4 a.m. yesterday and couldn’t get back to sleep so I went out for a hike before work, a first for me. Fires in the Superstitions blanketed the distant mountains in smoke, resulting in the soft red light of sunrise lingering for a while even after the sun had fully risen. The human-caused fire has currently burned over 100,000 acres.
Dance for me,
for me alone,
before the rising sun.
That you might show,
that I might know,
you and I are one.
Since she always wanted to be near us, we kept a dog bed in most rooms of the house so Ellie would have a comfortable spot to sleep no matter where we were. Sometimes though she preferred either the tile or the hardwood floor, perhaps because it was cooler. This was taken on a July evening 6 years ago at our house in Portland, long before we added air conditioning, so the cooler floor probably was an attraction.
Boo had a difficult time in the transition to the new house and more so I think with Ellie’s failing health and her death. At times he went to the bathroom elsewhere in the house, at first in my wife’s closet but things got more serious when he switched to my closet. After Ellie died my wife bought a couple of new cat beds and he peed on both of those, and occasionally pooped around the house, but that cleared up in time. He’s still a bit unsure of himself but he’s been on the straight and narrow as far as bathroom duties are concerned for a while now. I was nervous when we got my new couch and kept the doors to my office closed when I wasn’t in it but it turned out to be an unnecessary precaution, he’s enjoyed being able to curl up beside me or on my legs. Here he’s on the cat tree where he can watch the birds in the backyard.
As a young photographer I had trouble keeping the horizon straight in my pictures and I only got better when cameras added built-in levels in the viewfinder. Despite appearances the camera was level in this picture, the white-winged dove is leaning over to get at the last bit of saguaro fruit while sitting on angled arms. Sometimes I’ll deliberately angle the camera if I think it works better for the picture but in this case I like the lean. Taken last year, they’ve been hiding from me this year.
A moose cow walks through a dead forest at Yellowstone National Park. I find that pictures don’t properly convey just how large these creatures are. In this case I was standing at my car beside the road but in the Tetons I sometimes met them on the trails, I never had any close calls but the big bulls during the fall rut certainly demand your attention. I’m thankful for each time we met, it was always a special treat.
Ellie and I playing catch with a tennis ball at the dog park at Irving Park in the fall of 2011. She couldn’t go off-leash when we adopted her in 2009 but with a desire to please and a desire for treats she was pretty easy to train and soon enough was able to zoom around the park.
Usually I see woodpecker nests in vertical saguaro arms but this male and his mate had chosen an angled arm. At 5:20 am with the sun about to rise they were already bringing food to the nest, in this case a moth. Given the angle to the sun I wasn’t sure if the light would illuminate them when the sun came up or if the saguaro would cast them in shadow, and I still don’t know, as while they brought food to the nest at first they started holding back. Raising young is precarious and stressful enough so while I suspected they would quickly come to not see me as a threat I didn’t want to risk it and continued up the trail.
On my first trips to Yellowstone I knew I’d love the animals but I was surprised by how much I came to love the hot springs. It was this little part of Mammoth Hot Springs, taken from the Beaver Ponds Trail, that not only spurred on a desire to photograph the springs but to look for what I call little landscapes but are more commonly called intimate landscapes, small scenes inside of larger ones. Thankfully on my first visit I photographed it both in the evening light and in the soft diffuse light after the sun dropped behind the hills (shown here), as when I went back in later years the mineral deposits had changed and this spot lost its color.
Yellowstone was a long drive from Portland so I only went every handful of years, it’s further away now and there’s so much of the Southwest I want to explore that I’m not sure when I’ll go back, but I’ll always treasure each of my visits there, I’ve never been anyplace like it. I used to tease myself that I should visit once and only bring a macro lens and take nothing but close-ups of all the things I could never see at home but of course with so much wildlife on display I never did it.
Boolie 