This morning dawned cool and damp… par for the course around here these days.
I had a couple of hours to spare this morning so I headed out, cameras in tow, to see if I could find something to photograph.
Here are the results:
Shortly after lunch today, I noticed a tom turkey and five hens meandering around our “front forty”.
The females were quite drab and practical. They spent ninety percent of the time foraging and pretty much ignored the tom.
The male on the other hand was splendid in his spring finery and strutted his stuff ninety percent of the time.
Of course, I spent ninety percent of the time with the camera focused on the male!
All of these photos were made through the glass of our storm door. These birds are way too wary to do anything else.
After about a half hour, they wandered around the garden, down the hill and out of sight.
Yesterday afternoon our friend Diane asked me to makes a few photos of the Peace Bridge in Memorial Park. The bridge is scheduled for replacement in the very near future.
Last evening, the sky and light were pretty nice so I took a drive to town to see if I could make the photos Diane asked for. While I was downtown, I made photos of a couple of other landmarks that were bathed in the evening light.
What is the difference between the first day of spring and the first spring day?
The answer, at least here in northern New England … “Six weeks!!!”
Over the past few days we have had periods of sleet. Just a thin coating accumulated on things and most of this disappeared pretty quickly. However, it has been cold enough and cloudy enough that that, even more than a day after it fell, traces of sleet were still hanging on in some spots.
Yesterday dawned foggy and stayed that way most of the day. After lunch I headed out for a walk to see if I could capture the “feeling” of our lovely spring day; the temperature was 33 degrees F.
About half way back on the return leg of my walk it began to rain lightly. About a half-hour after I got back inside, it began to snow. The snow lasted roughly an hour. When it stopped we had an inch or so on the ground.
Ahhh… Springtime in New England!
I ended up with two series of photographs from my walk.
Jane’s Barn:
Along a Foggy Woods Road:
Despite the inch of snow we got last night, spring is coming slowly to our neck of the woods. The new snow was gone by 10 AM. One sign that spring is nigh. Additionally, the local lakes and ponds are starting to show some open water and the birds are beginning to return. In the past week or so, we have been hearing sparse bird songs in the woods and a few waterfowl have appeared.
Late this morning Joan called me from Memorial Park (where she was doing some spring cleaning of the flower beds) . The news was that there was a pair of common mergansers on the Mill Pond. Of course, I dropped what I was doing, broke out Big Bertha for the first time in some months and headed downtown.
In addition to the mergansers there was a pair of geese present. The midday light was high and harsh. Terrible, especially, for photographing a black and white bird. I knew that “keepers” were unlikely but I spent an hour or so watching and photographing just for practice before heading home.
A few hours later, I returned to town to run some errands and stopped by the pond again to see if the birds were still around; both the geese and the mergansers were still there. Although the sun was still pretty high, the light was a bit better as there were some scattered clouds. I spent another hour or so photographing the mergansers.
Catching a merganser with prey on the surface was a rare treat. Generally, as with most diving birds, mergansers swallow their the prey while under water. One sees them with prey only when they are having difficulty in getting the prey down their gullet, as with the fairly large fish here.
Eventually, the wind kicked up and blew my hat into the pond. I got both feet wet retrieving the hat (just before it sank out of sight). and spooked the birds in doing so. I took this as sign to head home.
All of these photos are from the second session. They are more heavily cropped (one third to one half of the full frame) than I would like but mergansers are very wary birds.
March is prime time if you are in the maple syrup business. The sap is flowing and folks are boiling more-or-less constantly.
This weekend a number of local sugar houses were open for “tours”. I put tours in quotes since most sugar houses are small structures and thus a “tour” consists of maybe eight or ten people at maximum standing in a circle around the evaporator.
Joan and I took a break from our regular activities this afternoon and visited two Antrim sugar houses.
I, of course, took my camera along.
Most folks associate March with “Madness”. For me, March is associated with three other “M words”… Maple, Mud and Meeting. Maple as in maple sap/syrup. Mud as in mud season. Meeting as in Town Meeting. This past week we have had all three of these “M words”.
Yesterday afternoon, I went for a walk. At the end of our driveway, I had a choice… left and the mud of the “civilized” section of the road or right and the slush of the un-maintained section of our road. I opted for the slush.
Of course, I took my camera with me.
Yesterday afternoon was warm (just about freezing) and sunny, perfect for a walk on the lake. There are about half a dozen bob houses out on the lake (and a couple more on the shore by the boat ramp).
To my eye, the structures per se do not make particularly interesting photographs, particularly in the harsh late winter sun. However, there were many details that caught my eye.
Last Friday (1 March) , we spent most of the day on the lake… literally. The ice is about twenty inches thick.
We headed out before 11 AM and did not get back to the house until almost 4:30. We, there was a group of five of us, spent the day laying out guides and pulling a ground penetrating radar (GPR) apparatus across the ice in order to map the geology of the lake bottom. This was our second GPR session and a third is planned for this coming Thursday.
Of course, I carried my camera and made a few photographs while out and about.
Here they are:
In some ways we have had typical New Hampshire winter weather… periods of dull drab days and periods of bright, cloudless blue skies. What has not been typical are the multiple periods of warm weather. In the “old days” we would get a January thaw. These days we seem to get a thaw every few weeks.
The latest thaw was a couple of days in the middle of last week. The mud in the road was deep and spring-like. The road crew worked hard to keep it passable.
The last few days have been more typical of February, highs in the mid- to upper 20s F and lows in the low teens. The days have been bright and sunny… good for production by our new solar panels but challenging for photography. I have persisted none-the-less.
The first three photos were made in the last week, with a regular lens. The last six photos were made yesterday using a $20 “Holga lens” that I recently bought on an impulse. This 60 mm lens is all plastic and has a fixed aperture (f/8). Focusing is all manual and rather crude; there are small pictographs along the focus ring to indicate the distance. The resulting photos, all made in harsh February light, have “character”.
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