Joan and I took a walk yesterday to assess the state of the neighborhood wildflowers, especially the lady slippers.
We were a bit early for the annual lady slipper spectacular, but there was much else to keep us entertained.
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Mention “New England foliage” to most folks and they think of our autumn spectacle.
The spring-time “foliage show” is much more subtle.. mainly shades of green and yellow with a few muted reds of the swamp maples thrown in.
In my view, the vernal show is as pretty as the autumnal version.
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We keep a few bird feeders out by the greenhouse, just off the deck in back of the house. Watching (and occasionally photographing) the birds the feeders attract is a source of great pleasure in our lives.
However, the feeders are also the cause of great consternation… the neighborhood chipmunks seed thieves have decided that the sunflower seeds in the main feeder have been put there for them.
I keep telling them that the devices are called bird feeders for a reason but they do not seem to listen at all!
The best I have been able to manage is to train the critters who live under our shed to run for their lives when I open the doors leading out to the deck.
The individuals who live in the woods (judging from the direction they run when I chase them off) are still very brave… I have to walk up to the feeder and give it a whack to get them to jump off!
The “fellow” in the photo below sat atop the big rock by the deck and vocalized for some minutes last evening. I am not sure what it was saying (my ability to communicate in chipmunk-ese is poor; see above), but I imagine that s/he was warning all of the other chipmunks to stay away from the feeder.
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Yesterday afternoon I took a walk “down back” intending to make some photos of the upper beaver meadow.
It turned out that the light was lousy and the skies boring. so I turned my attention to the details of the new springtime growth.
Eventually the blackflies won out and I hie-tailed it back to the house,
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I was glad that I took my camera with me on Saturday when I headed out to do some errands. The skies were interesting for the first time in a long while.
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A week ago on Tuesday, Joan and I headed south in search of Spring.
When we arrived at Assateague Island National Seashore on Wednesday the temperature was 45 degrees, the wind was blowing at about 45 mph and the sky was spitting (a combination of salt spray and intermittent rain)… not exactly the weather we were hoping for!
None-the-less, we dropped the camper off at a campsite, donned a few layers of fleece with a topping of Gore-tex and headed out in search of horses and birds. We had a wonderful time despite the weather.
On Thursday, we awoke to horses in our campsite, egrets in the marsh beside the campsite and no change in the weather. After breakfast, we headed south to the Virginia side of Assateague Island and Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. We had another wonderful day.
The weather broke on Friday and we headed north and west to Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. We arrived just before lunch and spent roughly six hours exploring this wonderful place.
As the light began to fade, we turned the car towards suburban Washington, DC.
Here are my photos of the horses:
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Here are the birds, the egrets are from Assateague and the remainder from Blackwater:
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The weekend in suburban Washington, DC finally brought the lovely spring weather we had been hoping for.
We spent the weekend visiting with my parents, my sister and brother-in-law (who live nearby) and our daughter (who lives in Baltimore).
My parents live in a “soup-to-nuts” retirement “village” with lots of open space. There are many birds around and I was duly entertained on our daily walks around the grounds!
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We arrived home late Monday evening to find that spring had returned to New Hampshire in our absence. There is still ice on the lake and scattered pockets of snow in the woods, but we have great hope!
Yesterday, I had some errands to run in Peterborough. I decided to take the camera along and stop by the nesting loons I visited last week. When I arrived, another photographer (Don from Hudson, NH) just packing up. Word is getting out!
There are no young yet, but both adults were present. The adult not sitting on the nest was only nearby briefly, but two or three times during the couple of hours I watched, I heard it call from out on the water. The adult on the nest did not return the call.
Photographically, the conditions were tough. It was partly cloudly but the clouds were moving fast. The light changed minute-by-minute and ranged from harsh full sun to nice diffuse light; only the latter makes for good photos of black and white birds. It was only worthwhile to trip the shutter when the sun was behind a cloud.
Spending time watching a nesting bird is quite interesting. It is clearly a high stress job. The adult on the nest is hyper-aware… always listening and watching. At one point during this visit the adult arose briefly to shift position on the nest. A couple of times small groups of swimmers walked nearby; each time the adult scrunched down on the nest it what was clearly an attempt to hide.
You will note that in most of these photos the loon has its mouth open. This was true for the large majority of the time I observed it. One might think that they are calling or singing by looking at still photo. This is not the case, this animal did not make a sound during the time I observed it. Rather, the “panting” behavior is a thermoregulation strategy. Birds do not sweat but, by opening their mouths, they can evaporate saliva which helps them to shed heat. I have also observed this behavior in great blue herons on a hot summers day.
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Tuesday, Joan and her PCV colleagues decided to head back to Hinsdale for a re-survey… don’t ask! The weather was looking much better (sunny with a high around 80 deg. F) for odes than the last trip. I decided to tag along again.
I spent most of the day on the causeway at the Hinsdale setback, having a grand time photographing the odes. All but the last three photos were made there.
Early in the outward bound trip, I passed a pair of adult Canada Geese with a single gosling wandering down the roughly twelve foot wide causeway. Eventually they headed for the water with enough warning that I was able to remove the extension tube from the ode rig and make a couple of photos of them in nice morning light.
As I was finding and photographing odes, it slowly began to dawn on me that I was seeing things I was mostly familiar with and no “big river” species. The reason was also slow in coming, but it did eventually arrive… the portion of the river I was exploring is just up stream from the Vernon Dam. Thus, it is much more lake-like than riverine!
After mulling the situation over while eating my sandwich in a small patch of shade, I decided to head south. I had a vague memory that there was a boat launch on the river in Northfield, MA just south of the NH border. My memory served me well and I spent some time at the Pauchuag Brook boat launch. There is a nice stretch of muddy river bank to walk here. I saw only two odes a large clubtail and a damselfly (the penultimate and third from last photos). The dragonfly sat still only long enough for me to get a single frame. The area has potential and I intend to return there at some point.
I was just getting back to the car when Joan phoned saying that she was done. The folks she was with were planning to head south (east?) on route 119, so we agreed to meet at the park along the Ashuelot River in “down town” Hinsdale. While waiting for the group to arrive I, of course, explored the river. Being just below the dam, the river is fast moving here. I observed and photographed a single ebony jewelwing in the maybe ten minutes before Joan arrived.
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I need to finish identifying some of these critters, but have decided, in the interest of having a timely blog post, to put off this onerous chore!
It is about a quarter mile between our house and Gregg Lake. There is an old logging road that begins across from the end of our driveway and heads directly for the lake. On Monday, I spend a few hours wandering this road photographing odes.
I was able to photograph seven species in this short distance. (There are eight photos because I got both sexes of the Aurora Damsel.)
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How is that for an attention-getting post title!
It might be attention-getting, but it is a good description of the ode activity in our yard yesterday. There were dozens of whitefaces, at altitudes ranging from one to twelve feet constantly on the move and feeding. There were also smaller numbers of other species both hunting and mating.
In addition to the odes there were also decent numbers of butterflies around… small orange butterflies down low in the vegetation, many swallowtails nectaring (especially on the blackberries) and a single black butterfly on the edge of the road looking for salt. (The last two butterfly photos as of the same individual.)
There were often groups of three or four swallowtails doing their in flight dances… is this mating behavior or is it about territory? More stuff to learn!
Through it all, the chipmunks living in our stone walls would chatter at me. I guess that they want the yard to themselves.
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