Several birds have visited our bird feeder since we’ve moved into the new apartment. I have yet to get a really good capture of any of them though the opportunities have been there. I’m hoping to score a few before winter is over.

This particular bird, I think, is a Black Phoebe.

Waiting for the coffee to finish brewing with my buddy.

Here is @pookers’ butt.

/via Jason Kottke.

Someone flipped a box lid on top of themselves.

Sometimes we communicate this way in the morning. Isn’t Pookers cute?

This guy deserved two photos.

You know all of the jokes that I’m thinking about right now. So I don’t need to type them.

He loves to sit next to me when I read.

I’m loving this book. Too bad it doesn’t help me with my cats!

Guardian has a list of species that we’ve either lost or may lose in this decade alone. Sad.

Via Jason Kottke.

This is my blog and I can post as many ‘hey my cat is cute and is sleeping’ videos that I want to, b’okay?

After going outside it appears there are, and this isn’t an actual head count just a best guess, hundreds of thousands of lady bugs swarming around our apartment building alone. Due to other friends reporting the same in their area I’m calling it a plague.

Eliza spotted this little guy yesterday. Left him alone. I have enough pictures of cross orbweaver spiders.

A few photos from fishing the other night with my friend Johnny. I posted a pretty wicked toothed Walleye on that night but we ended up with a pretty decent catch in a relatively short period of time. Huzzah.

Click on the images to zoom. For much, much larger versions click here, and here.

I’ve been remiss to update everyone on our current bird feeder situation. Since Eliza purchased the $1 bird feeder we’ve upgraded our offerings to our feathered friends many fold. First, we put out a bird-bath type feeder that, rather than filling it with water, we fill with sunflower seeds. This takes care of the needs of larger birds that like to eat off of an exposed, tray based feeder – like Blue Jays. Second, we have a small ‘gazebo’ shaped feeder for smaller birds like finches, chickadees, etc.

Recently at a yard sale we picked up a larger version of the gazebo shaped feeder and have since mounted it to our glass doors to the deck. This isn’t getting nearly as many visitors as the smaller one (though that seems to be changing), but we have plans to slowly bring the birds closer and closer to the doors for better shots.

Not two days ago we picked up a hummingbird feeder. Eliza had spotted a few hummingbirds buzzing around our flowers and, after I saw one hovering over our red flowers, I thought it a good idea to pick up a feeder. We’ll update the progress with this in the near future.

So, how many birds are we getting? A lot. I fill the smaller feeder once every three or four days and I fill the bird-bath feeder every single morning with sunflower seeds. Morning doves, Blue Jays, and a few other birds that I have yet to identify accurately visit this feeder regularly. We’ve had chickadees, nut hatches, finches, tufted tit-mouse, cardinals (though not many lately), hummingbirds, and several other species so far. Our little fly-thru bird restaurant is becoming quite the hang out.

Today, as you can see from the photos above, I managed to stand near the door long enough that they let me open it, and open the screen door, to get unobstructed photos of them while they ate. Taking photos of creatures that fly and skip about rather quickly isn’t easy – but above are two of the better shots I managed to capture.

Looking forward to many, many more visitors.

This is all Eliza’s fault. She has created a monster. But a cute monster.

Caught this little guy while fishing in Prompton, PA a few weeks ago. The thing to watch out for when catching toads is that they are not being stalked by some other animal like a snake or snapping turtle. They are the main source of food for many animals so beware.

Nikki did not want this turtle to be hurt so she rescued it from the middle of the road.

While waiting for a ride this weekend I walked over to a small patch of wild flowers growing behind our garbage cans (there is beauty everywhere in this world, isn’t there?). I was attempting to get a half-decent shot of this bumble bee that was bouncing from flower to flower, sucking up the nectar while at the same time pollinating the entire patch by himself.

I suppose I managed to get a half-decent shot of him, but I really appreciate the details in the flower itself – the fact that it is just beginning to dry up on its edges, that its a color that I can not identify (I call it a pinkish purple), and that it grows behind garbage cans.

I’ve never really taken any photos of the things I’ve caught over the years, but I’m going to start doing so and sharing them here. In Pennsylvania we have a fairly diverse ecosystem of creepy-crawly things and I’ll do my best to seek them out. First up, a snake and a frog.

On Saturday while visiting a nearby park I caught a few Garter snakes (probably about 6 different snakes) and frogs. The type of Garter snakes we have around here are the eastern version of the Common Garter snake, a relatively calm, absolutely harmless snake. The only way you’d be bitten (and these guys have extremely small yet sharp teeth so even if you get bit the wound is very minor) is if you pick up a female too quickly. The males could generally care less if they are picked up. However, it is all about the approach. If you approach these guys in a calm manner, you can pick them up gently without any fear of harm or even aggression from them.

And then, of course, a bullfrog.

I’m going to make a concerted effort to catch more wild things over the course of this summer and also to share some of my techniques with catching things, releasing them, and causing as little harm to the animals as possible. I hope you will enjoy a little something different here at First Initial, Last Name.

I wish I had taken a lot more photos (I didn’t even get everyone in a photo). I’m looking forward to camping at least one more time this summer (and hopefully for more than just one night). All-in-all a great short trip and everyone seemed to have a good time.

Right in front of the TV.

22 hours of sleep is obviously not enough.

Moments after this photo Pookers stole the Twizzler for himself.

Date taken: April 1, 2004 | Clifford, Pennsylvania.

Five years ago today: I’m a little late posting this one but five years and about two weeks ago today I found this salamander – who was quite large – sitting on the steps outside of our apartment in Clifford, PA.

I’ve wanted to have a bird feeder on one of our windows for a while. I’ve looked a few times for one and somehow turned up empty handed. Last week Eliza returned from a shopping trip with a $1, suction cup powered, bird feeder for our window! Thanks Eliza!

This morning at 8:30AM I hung the bird feeder and put some seed in it. So the countdown until we have our first bird begins. I plan on chronicling what goes on with this feeder here on my blog. Once we get some visitors I’m going to setup my tripod and camera to see if I can get some good photos of the birds.

Oh, and since I got the seed from my mother-in-law’s bag of bird seed, this was truly a $1 investment! Can’t beat that.

Yeah, I’ll go with mind == blown too.  I wonder where a brother can find out what these things taste like.

Source: See A Fish With A Transparent Head.
Via: Justin Blanton.

Update: It turns out that this fish isn’t a new discovery but the fact that their eyes rotate and that their heads are transparent is. More info.

I had the privilege of producing this, and the next four, episodes of Eat Weird. I think they’ll get better as they go along in this latest series of episodes – which I’m calling the Dave Ciminelli series. Episode 4, which is due out Friday, is going to be a really fun episode – but I believe that the quality of each episode and our ability to produce them will go up as we go.

Maybe if I do well enough Chris will let me keep the producers chair full-time until he can find a replacement. We’ll see. For now, Live Well, and Eat Weird.

Source: Eat Weird – Episode 3: Wild Goose Breast Salad.

I’m going to try to keep doing watercolor paintings, maybe even one each week. This week I really wanted to do an owl, so here I present my fifth watercolor in this new effort; The Owl.

I tried a few techniques this time that I hadn’t before. Some of them worked out quite well, like under-shading on the Owl (probably hard to see in any of the photos).  Some of them didn’t work out so well, because I did them wrong, like the snow by using salt.  I didn’t use enough water to make the salt effective.

The salt, if done right, will cause the watercolor to separate and move away from the salt. It would end up causing a neat effect that would work well for snow, stars, or other textures. But, again, I didn’t use enough water for this to work.

There is a lot that I would do differently, if given the chance, so I’m really looking forward to my next crack at another painting next week.  Overall I’m thrilled with the way this painting came out – but there are a few subtle things (like the snow) that I wanted to add to this and I simply didn’t do it the right way.

Live, learn, move on, try again. Here are some more photos of my watercolor paintings. Next I think I’m going to tackle a Japanese sign.

Silouette of my bud.

But, immediately after that, while going through my feeds from the last few weeks I ran across the World Animal Day photos on The Big Picture. Instantly humbled.

Source: World Animal Day.

There are tons of crabs on the beach here on Indian Beach in Salter Path, NC.

Lady Chancery trolls by our “secret” cove where Andrew and I did some snorkeling.  Today we had planned to head out either Sand Dollar Island or Shackleford Banks to do some snorkeling, shell finding, or seeing if we could locate some wild horses.

Andrew and crab

Instead we ended up snorkeling off of Radio Island.  When we arrived to Beaufort, North Carolina to hit a ferry ride to one of the islands, Captain Don let us know that the tide was in and that visibility would be extremely low.  He did mention that there would be 3ft. black tip sharks – and that made Andrew and I want to go more – but he said we wouldn’t be able to see them in the water.

You see, North Carolina just recently got an incredible amount of rain due to Tropical Storm Kyle.  All of that rain washes out the marshes and stirs up silt from the rivers that feed into the ocean.  All of this extra sediment and junk floating in the water made it pretty murky.

Captain Don then told us of a free, safe spot to do a little snorkeling. It was off of Radio Island, beyond a Yacht Club. So that is where we went and ended up saving $60 and having a pretty good time to boot.

We managed to sneak a peak of quite a few fishes, crabs, and snails in their multi-colored shells.  A great time. Looking forward to trying to find more of these little-known areas on the Crystal Coast.

Eliza trapped him in the office due to bad behaviour. He made the best of it by watching birds out the window.

Wild Pig, Florida – ricksege

Finally some real news! A 63-year old woman learns a lesson that many learn by feeding a stray cat; never feed a wild animal. However, Caroline Hayes didn’t feed a helpless stray cat that became a nuisance thereafter.  She fed a 176 pound wild pig.

Neighbors, who have observed the pig taking a mattress out of Caroline’s garage and ripping it to shreds, have named the pig Bruce. Cute. Rangers, who came to transport the pig, brought too small of a cage. Well played. And Ms. Hayes is trapped in her home because, well, a huge hungry pig can be pretty aggressive.

The current plan is to trap the pig and send it to a piggery for butchering. As irony would have it, Ms. Hayes is a vegetarian, so she will not be getting any sort of sweet revenge on Bruce.

You may send the bacon thisaway plz.

The lesson? Never feed a wild animal that is larger than you are unless you intend to eat it.

Source: BBC News: Large pushy pig traps Australian.
Via: Boing Boing.

Just about one year ago I posted a photo of this bird without too much explanation besides that I had taken the photo in the Tampa Bay in Florida in August of 2001. But there is a little more to this story.

What reminded me of this story was our life poster that is hanging in our living room.  Whenever Eliza and I have guests our life poster is a topic of discussion and, for whatever reason, I’m drawn to the story behind the photo of this bird on the poster.  If you follow the link to the life poster, you’ll see I’ve noted the photo using a Flickr note. So, I thought I’d tell that story here.

My brother Derrick lives in St. Petersburg, Florida – a city my family lived in a few times.  I lived there from the ages of 2 through 5.  We have friends that owned a very nice home on Tampa Bay and during a visit to their house in August 2001 we saw an egret perched on a neighbor’s dock.  I decided it’d be fun to feed the egret one of the many lizards that were bouncing through the leaves next to our friend’s pool.

Derrick caught the lizard while I got as close to the bird as possible for a few good shots.  Using the lizard as my primary means of keeping the egret’s attention – and boy did I have it – I was able to get off a few good photos of him.

I sometimes find it regrettable that I only had a 2.1MP digital camera at the time, but like I said in my post regarding creating a simple video podcast – you shouldn’t skip opportunities based on the quality of your equipment.

The egret allowed me to get very, very close to him and ended up eating the lizard right out of my hand before taking off.  You can see from the first photo that he didn’t even swallow the lizard before he took off and landed on a dock about 5 homes away and munched away.

Photography, for me, isn’t always about getting the best shot but about the stories behind the photos.  I’m much more interested in the stories that happened before, during, and after a photo was taken than I am in the photo itself.

I’ll remember this and many other stories about my life because they were captured in photos.  And I’m looking forward to many more future memories caught on film, err, disk.

My love of insects on this blog continues. But we’re going to take a break from moths today.

One of my friends needed some help moving a refrigerator and while doing so we found this Cross Orbweaver spider (Araneus diadematus) hanging in a web off the front of a house.  The photos included in this post don’t really do this spider’s size too much justice, but for Pennsylvania this is a fairly big spider.

This Cross Orbweaver spider was energetic, so getting a really good shot of it proved to be a pretty big challenge.  With the help of two friends; one manning a stick to move the spider around, while the other handed me lenses on-demand, I was able to get about 6 quality shots of this spider. I’ve included two of them here.

This appears to be a female Cross Orbweaver spider.  They range from 6 to 15mm in length, and live in many areas of the United States and Canada.  From what I’ve researched they enjoy creating their webs on structures like homes and really like to be under unnatural lighting to catch their prey.  This one proved that theory by being attached to the front of a house near a porch light.

The silk that this spider weaves is unique. It is extremely sticky when touched, almost like hot taffy, and is very strong and light.  When we were moving the spider from the ground to the fence, or just suspending him in the air, he’d shoot out his silk in such a way that many different strands would float into the air and he was able to keep himself afloat this way.  It was amazing.

The web that they weave, which you can read about and see on this site, is very sporadic and random in its design.  I’m looking forward to doing some research on how and why they spin these types of webs when I get a few minutes to do so.

Insects!

You asked for it and so now you’re getting it.

When I installed the Skribit widget on my suggestions page I didn’t realize that some of you would ask for something like radioactive llamas with super powers, but you did, and so now you have me doing Google searches for that very term.

It turns out that in Alberta, Canada that a farmer is “producing llamas that glow in the dark”.  I guess sometime a half-century ago the farm was used to pile junk from a uranium mine.

Is it true? Who knows?  But if you are seriously looking for radioactive llamas with super powers, and I mean why wouldn’t you be seriously looking for them, I suggest giving Mount Lehman Llamas a call.

Source: Sailfish – Photo Gallery.

Pookers is “working” with me today.

Steve Winter, wildlife photographer, set up some cameras to take photos of Snow Leopards.  The result ends up being a pretty great set of photos that could have never been taken by humans because of the Leopards notorious reclusive nature.

Almost looks fake doesn’t it?  Beautiful.

Source: Out of the Shadows – Photo Gallery, National Geographic Magazine.
Hat tip: Apple, Inc. 

My friend Chris just showed up for dinner and Game 4 of the NBA Finals and immediately he said there was a cool looking moth outside.  I grabbed my camera and bolted for the door.

On my finger, for scale.

How do I find out the real names for these moths?  It turns out there are an incredible amount of moth types.  I personally love Bug Guide’s tools for figuring out what bug you found.

I think I’m going to keep it a long-term goal to continue to add photos of moths to my site. As I mentioned on Twitter yesterday the number of referrals to my site from Google’s Image search for moth are staggering ((At least to me.)). I’m looking forward to working at this new goal.

In case you’ve missed them in the past, check out the Tolype Velleda and cecropia moth.

One of our friends raises natural beef cattle. Had a burger today, delicious.

A sea lion?

Yesterday I saw my friend Daniel Nicolas twitter; “there was a seal at the beach! yes i got pictures”.  I knew once he published the photos I was going to link to them.

But then I got to thinking – did he really mean seal or did he mean sea lion?

Once he had the photos up I began doing a little digging to jog my memory about the differences between a seal and a sea lion, both of which are Pinnipeds, or “fin-footed mammals”.  It is a pretty simple classification really.  If you have a fin as a foot, you give birth to live young, feed your young with milk, are warm blooded, and have hair on your body – you’re a Pinniped.  However, the main difference between a sea lion and a seal is that sea lions have ears and can walk on all fours.

But, you might be saying, but so can fur seals.  This is where things start to get a little muddy.  The number of species of seal are actually quite numerous.  California sea lions, for example, are the most common species used in circuses and the like, but there are suborders of both seal and sea lion ranging in the hundreds.  Australian, Japanese, Galapagos, and Stellar are just a few suborders of sea lion.  New Zealand, Antarctic, Subantarctic, Northern Fur, and Cape Fur are just a few suborders of seals.

So what did Danny shoot?  I’m sticking with sea lion – partially because of my close examination of the photos, and partially because I know that Danny is from somewhere near San Diego.

What do you think it is?

Source: Flickr: Photo uploads from May 20, 2008 by djloche.

Date taken: January 11, 2008 | Resting on a street lamp on the lower-east side of Central Park in New York City.

Date taken: November 3, 2007 | The camera shutter inspired a sudden movement with each photo. Moo.

Date taken: November 3, 2007 | We love our Pookers.