Month: August 2017

Summer is winding down now, but we still sit outside with a glass of rosé in the evening. Last night George was joined by a large flock of wild turkeys, four females and all their little ones, maybe twenty in all. They practice communal childcare, very sensible.

At the same time, on the scarlet honeysuckle growing beside our porch, was our smallest bird, a female Ruby-throated Hummingbird. An adult weighs about 3.8g.

A fully grown male wild turkey can weigh up to 14Kg. That is as much as 3500 hummingbirds.

 

Too late, I realized that even though we were well away from the path of totality, it would still have been smart to get a pair of special eclipse glasses. So I had to improvise. The pinhole camera I made out of a cereal box was useless, but even simpler methods were rather magical.

The first photo shows the patterns made by the sun through the leaves of our hickory tree: see how the crescent shape of the 50% eclipsed sun shows up?

The next photo is the shadow cast by my kitchen colander’s round holes: each hole creates its own pinhole camera, and the screen is the white siding on our house. And each hole shows the crescent shape.

The last photo is the intact sun at the end of the same day, setting over the White Mountains seen from our porch.

Human skin is so familiar we pay it little attention. But other creatures have the most astonishing outer garments, if you get up close enough to see.

The first picture is a Gray Treefrog. It is about 2 inches long, and lives mainly on the bark of trees, for which it is well-camouflaged, but on the ground it is more vulnerable. When scared, it freezes, which makes it possible to get in close for a portrait. But just look at its knobbly skin, And it can change colour from gray to green too.

The second picture is a Hickory Tussock Moth caterpillar, about 1/2″ long. We have a large hickory tree behind our house, so its presence in the garden is unsurprising.  Amazing eyebrows, and so many spines you can’t tell which end is which, though in fact the head is to the left.

I am used to seeing birds preening, but I hadn’t really paid attention to the fact that bees groom too. After a very heavy rainfall, this bee spent twenty minutes or so using its hind legs to groom its fuzzy body, top and bottom.

The same morning, this Chipping Sparrow found a sunny rock, and then yawned.  You can see his tongue.

The young male Hairy Woodpecker, whose plumage was still not quite how he wanted it to be, embarked on a serious grooming session. Notice how he uses his tail to brace himself against the tree branch.

Then he worked his way around his body, missing nothing.

Quite like any teenager.

 

 

 

This week I walked in to my beaver pond, and sat for an hour by the water. Next to me was a carnivorous sundew plant. If you look closely you can see the sticky mucus that traps the flies, and two small victims near the bottom of the closeup photo.

A curious beaver came and swam up to me. Their vision is very poor, so although he knew there was something odd, he wasn’t sure exactly what. A few tail slaps, but he didn’t leave.

And a family of young wood ducks appeared in the distance. They are usually very skittish, but these ones never noticed me.

As I was about to leave, there was loud squawking in the distance, and an eagle swooped down on a heron, but the heron saw him off, and continued to fish.

All this, only 45 minutes walk back in the woods behind my house.