Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
As summer turned to fall in September 2009, an adult fork-tailed bush katydid dined on one of our rose blossoms. Once I discovered they were eating the rose petals I stopped pruning the flowers after they lost their aesthetic appeal and only cut them once the petals fell off. Which worked out well for both the katydids and myself, as they loved the roses and I loved watching them.
Perhaps wildlife watching would be more apt, it might have been a squirrel in the big trees out front that grabbed his attention rather than a bird. From the summer of 2009 in Portland, this was our first cat tree back before it got so much love it had to be retired.
After months of searching I finally found a location so secret that even the superest of spies won’t be able to … track me … down … welp, time to start searching again.
We often think of predators as animals with sharp teeth and claws but I wonder if the owner of these yellow legs isn’t the creature that most haunts the nightmares of the fish and frogs and voles of Ridgefield. If you see these yellow kicks hiding in the shallows, best hope the bittern isn’t hungry.
I’ve always taken great comfort in photographing the same scene over time so it was a delight on a visit to Yellowstone in 2011 to retake a shot from 2009, although this time with a difference: I used a telephoto instead of a normal lens.
While on a visit to Ridgefield on a rainy Christmas in 2011, I accidentally took a short nap while in a pullout beside Rest Lake (I mean, given the name of the lake, hardly my fault) which meant I was lucky enough to be in the right position when driving past the meadow that I got to spend quite a while watching a coyote hunting voles in the rain. It’s what I loved about the auto tour, getting to watch animals behave naturally at relatively close distances without disturbing them.
These pictures are a bit bittersweet as while I got to watch the family at length multiple times that winter, my pictures from a couple of months later would be my last photos of coyotes at the refuge as they were shot to create a safer haven for the threatened Columbian white-tailed deer that were about to be transplanted. Thankfully the deer seemed to be establishing themselves by the time I had to say goodbye to the refuge so hopefully coyotes have been allowed back since.
I’m not sure the many Townsend’s voles in the meadows around the refuge missed the coyotes, although perhaps they didn’t notice given the wide variety of predators that ate them. It was always a little hard to watch through the big lens as one little life was snuffed out, even knowing it allowed another life to continue. I always hoped to photograph a vole on its own but I only ever managed to catch them when something else caught them first.
I’ve been editing some old pictures to bring old blog posts back online and was surprised to find this picture of a young Samwise snuggling up on my legs, adopted a month prior, never made it online. He turns 13 this month, with Ellie gone all the pets he grew up with have died. He loved being the youngest so I feel for the tender-hearted little fellow. He’s not wanted Trixie to snuggle up with him lately but that may be more a displeasure with the summer heat, we’ll see in a bit when the worst of the heat breaks for the year.
A trip to New Mexico in 2007 provided my one and only view of the lovely Williamson’s sapsucker, this is a male perched on a favorite tree. They prefer Ponderosa Pine forests and that’s not a habitat I’ve been in much since. You can see the irregular and regular pattern of holes he’s drilled into the tree to encourage it to secrete the sap he craves. It was a wonderful trip although it had far more import than I could have known as when it came time to look for work a decade later, it got me thinking of New Mexico, which got me thinking about Arizona, and here we are.
A Costa’s hummingbird shows off his purple crown on a winter morning. The color is based on the way the light falls upon the feathers, not pigment, so when he had his head turned his crown appeared black (as the rest of his face and throat does here, but they will light up too if the light is at the right angle).
On a sunrise walk on the boardwalk through the saltwater marsh at Huntington Beach State Park, I met this yellow-crowned night heron hunting fiddler crabs in the mud while the tide was out. The hungry bird snared one after the other, tossing them down its throat, so it’s a good thing the little crabs seemed endless in number. Taken in the summer of 2007.
Boolie 