Eyes on the Wild

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.

Sometimes people hint that taking so many photos interferes with truly looking at what is in front of me, but for me the reverse is often true. Consider things that are too tiny for my unassisted human eye to see, and that I often don’t notice until I look at the photos later on my computer.

This tiny lichen is called the Red-fruited Pixie Cup, for obvious reasons. Each cup is 6-25mm tall, and the bright red protuberances are the fruiting bodies.Or consider these ants. A child knocked over the rotting tree stump by mistake, exposing these pupae. Out rushed the ants to move them one by one to safety. Each pupa looks like a perfectly formed white waxy proto-ant.

So I defend my right to take photos.

Mushrooms grow with astonishing speed, and the fully-grown mushroom often looks quite different from the baby version. The photos below are both amanitas. As the mushroom grows, the universal veil usually leaves patches stuck to the cap, and the partial veil (which encloses just the gills), often leaves a ballerina-like skirt around the stalk. And just so you know, these are poisonous.

This is a different species, but it grew nearly as fast (I was away for a day, so it might have been less time than my photos show). But the transformation is even more dramatic, from something that looks like a cottage-loaf (or a puffball), into a true toadstool.

 

For some time, friends have been suggesting I start a blog, and I have finally got around to trying. I live in two wild and beautiful places: Western Maine , USA, and the Cotswolds, England.  I also travel to far-flung much wilder places.

I take photos with my trusted Panasonic Lumix, sometimes beautiful photos, more often photos that tell a story.

The blog will be erratic, depending on what catches my eye.

For my first post, from Maine, here are the tree swallows that nested in our old purple martin house and raised four young. They fledged two weeks ago.