Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
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.
A marsh wren pulls nesting material from a cattail, soaked on a wet spring afternoon.
A raccoon hunts along the shoreline of Bower Slough.
A buffalo takes a dust bath in a wallow beside the Storm Point Nature Trail in Yellowstone National Park.
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.
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.
Ellie curled up with her two favorite toys on the dog bed in my office. She is crazy for these orange balls, I can’t take one on our walks because she spends the entire walk trying to poke it out of my hand. I wake to Ellie and her ball in the morning (she climbs in beside me when my wife gets up). I used to not let her have the balls in the house as they carry a lot of energy when they bounce, but in her advancing years she’s happy enough to play gently with me on the couch.
A yellow-rumped warbler (Myrtle) gets pelted by the rain on a spring afternoon.
A yellow-rumped warbler pauses at the edge of South Quigley Lake on a spring afternoon.
A great blue heron preens its neck feathers by running them through the tip of its bill.
Boolie 