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Yellow Patches

Yellow Patches

A yellow-rumped warbler (Audubon’s) shows off many of his yellow patches (but not the one for which he is named). His patches weren’t very colorful, not sure if it was due to age, diet, or something else. He was visiting the suet feeder in my backyard along with some of our more typical winter visitors, I took the picture from inside my office with the window open (and screen removed).

A Muddy Beak

A muddy beak

I didn’t have much exposure to great blue herons before I moved to Oregon years ago, but the ones I had seen hunted in bodies of water, so I was rather surprised when I moved here and saw herons frequently hunting on land. This young heron, as you can see from its muddy beak, was hunting for voles in a meadow. There’s a little bit of blood at the base of its beak, I’m not sure if it’s from the heron or one of its victims.

Sam & Boo

Sam & Boo

Sam had been sleeping on my legs when Boo, who had been with us for about six months, came in and snuggled up tight with him. I thought Sam would get up but instead they both fell fast asleep. I wanted to snap a picture as a reminder of how our slow introduction of the shy little Boo had paid off, and thankfully had my EOS M beside me on the couch.

The M doesn’t have an articulating screen so I held the camera out blind and hoped for the best. Thankfully I had the zoom lens attached as it has image stabilization, I needed to stop down to increase the depth of field and in the low room lighting even at ISO 3200 ended up with a shutter speed of a third of a second. It doesn’t combat the blur from their breathing but it did help quite a bit with camera shake.

The Fallen Perch

The Fallen Perch

A barn swallow takes a break from hunting insects over Long Lake on a rainy spring day. This was one of my favorite spots at the refuge to take pictures, the dead tree to which this branch was attached was close to the road and I spent many hours just sitting in my car watching to see what would swim or walk or fly by, but sadly the tree fell over into the lake.

Pika in the snow

Pika in the snow

In December this pika picture got linked to from a popular site and the resulting traffic spike pushed me over my monthly allowance, so I shut down the personal site I had run for almost two decades and started looking at other options. In the end I decided to give Flickr and WordPress a try for a year and then will decide if I’ll go back to self-hosting or not.

I’ve re-edited the picture and I think it looks better than it did on my old site, and even better you can download it at a much larger size. It’s also much easier for me to upload images both here and at my blog, so there are some definite advantages to my new setup.

I met this pika in the fall of 2007 on the trail to Amphitheater and Surprise Lakes in Grand Teton National Park, a trail I’ve hiked on multiple occasions. My pictures of this pika are my last pictures from the trip. The white in the background is snow, I had to turn around higher up on the trail as the snow was getting too deep for my hiking shoes. Originally I was going to spend the next day in the park but ended up cutting the trip short as the area got hit with a heavy snowstorm.

Life, like the weather, can bring unexpected changes, hopefully this one will be for the best.

Treed

Treed

While driving past Bower Slough I came upon a family of river otters that were fishing and preening and playing. After a while a family of raccoons came meandering down the shoreline but they bolted for the trees when the otters saw them. After the otters circled the trees for a while they moved on and eventually the raccoons descended back to the ground. This one initially got caught behind some wire mesh that had been put around the base of the tree to protect it from beavers, but it climbed back up past the mesh and hopped into an adjacent tree and then to the ground.