For us, like many, Memorial Day weekend means the beginning of summer. As is our habit, we headed north to “open up” camp for the season.
Opening up camp is not a big deal since there are no utilities involved… we evicted the mice who had taken up residence over the winter, picked up a few things, swept the place up and were ready to go! In addition to these chores on Saturday, we spent Sunday afternoon finishing up last years siding project. However, I was also able to find several good chunks of time for photography.
Although I never strayed more than 100 yards from camp, I was never lacking in subjects. Dragonflies were present in abundance, both numerically and in the variety of species. I only saw two damselflies the entire weekend… too early in the season I guess.
One of the damselflies I saw was an ebony jewelwing which cruised by quickly along the lake shore. This was very odd as the jewelwings are most usually associated with the flowing water of small streams and rivers. I have never observed them on the lake before. It was probably a fluke but we’ll see as the summer progresses.
As is often the case, I noticed many other insects as I stalked dragonflies and a couple of photos of these are included in the set below.
There were a couple of permanent residents who were not happy with our arrival. We had noticed that the beaver house in the corner of the cove looked to be in pretty good shape and about dusk on Saturday we noticed two beavers out and about. One of them was clearly not pleased with our presence! He (or maybe she) cruised by the cabin a dozen time or more slapping its tail loudly on each pass. Of course, I wanted a photo of the action and ended up having Joan wave a bright yellow life jacket when the beaver was in a good spot photographically just to get a tail slap. The light was very low but here is an OK image of a beaver tail and big splash.
[singlepic id=66 w=300 h= mode= float=]
The permanent residents of the amphibious kind were also present… we saw both a green frog and a couple of northern leopard frogs around the rocks on the beach.
At mid-afternoon on Monday we had two visitor of the avian persuasion… a loon and a great blue heron. The loon fished quite contentedly and quite nearby for sometime; probably kept in the cove by the boat activity out on the main part of the lake. The heron fished briefly on both sides of the cove before taking off again. The harsh mid-day light did not make for good photographs of either one.
Here are the weekend’s photographs…
[nggallery id=11]
I’m still working on identifying most of the dragonflies… this is not one of my strong points!