Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
This fall the status of the Columbian white-tailed deer was improved from endangered to threatened. I’d guess this young buck, eating in a meadow beside Long Lake, is one of the offspring of deer that were captured and moved to Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge as a part of the recovery efforts. I saw him in late December, one of his antlers had already fallen off but the other was not yet ready to let go.
I was watching a bittern that had mostly moved out of view when this pied-billed grebe swam over as it hunted for fish. The sun was just starting to push the fog away and bathed the grebe in a gentle light.
I visited Ridgefield a handful of times over the Christmas break and was saddened to see that my favorite spot to watch bitterns, a little strip along Rest Lake, had been mowed close to the ground. There is plenty of cover in other areas near this strip so the bitterns still have ample places to hunt, they just won’t be visible from the road. So I was ecstatic on my last visit, when I had stopped to watch some bufflehead in an earlier section of Rest Lake, to notice this bittern hunting in the tall grasses. I only had a little window through the grasses to see it but it was a real delight to watch one of my favorite birds again.
I don’t think it’s fair that Boo doesn’t have to follow the laws of physics like the rest of us.
Many of the garages in our old neighborhood are too small to hold modern cars. Even our little Crosstrek is a tight fit in our old one car garage. I’ve wanted to photograph these side-by-side garages for a while, as they have seen better days yet still hint at their former glory, and on this day fortune smiled as Ellie decided to walk down this street and I happened to have my camera with me.
For thousands of years on Christmas Eve, children have hoped to catch Santa delivering presents under the Christmas tree. But he always managed to avoid detection, until this year that is, when he looked down at a box beside a Christmas tree and realized, too late, the box was looking back at him. Don’t feel bad Santa, Boo is a clever little fellow. And the Boo Box has only increased his powers.
We got a little bit of snow on the weekend but it was the freezing rain that followed that made a mess of things. It did make for some lovely patterns in our rain garden though, the ice was starting to melt when I took this picture, I liked the way the ice had slightly pulled away from the rocks with a bright white line etched in its wake.
Within a couple of hours it had all melted and I was able to take Ellie on her first walk after missing the previous two.
I took this picture from inside the house as an unusually heavy snowstorm blanketed Portland. The snow was still falling when I went to sleep, I measured 10 inches of snow outside the garage in the morning.
Our cat Sam watches the snow fall outside our picture window. This is the fourth time we’ve gotten snow this crazy winter but this is the first heavy snowfall. The other times ice was much more of a problem, but this is the lovely snow I had hoped to take Ellie out in the previous times. They’ve canceled work tomorrow so I’ll be able to take her on a nice long walk in the morning.
As someone who loves playing around with shapes and colors and textures, my head nearly explodes when I see a scene like this. Sadly I didn’t have a wider lens at the time but I did my best to capture how many different little scenes you could see from this one location. Two of my recent posts (the orange mineral deposits and the watery fingers) were taken from this spot but with a longer lens, plus some other pictures I may post in the future. Mammoth Hot Springs is always crowded since it is both fascinating and right next to the hotel, so as someone who is a bit crowd averse I limit my time here, but otherwise I think I could spend a week wandering around. One of my favorite hiking trails also leads up from near here.
Oh Yellowstone!
Boolie 