All I know about armadillos I know from FC and Bear, yet I couldn’t help feeling slightly enchanted by this bumbling creature…
Category Archives: Snapshots
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It’s not the Pacific, but I’m hedging my bets with the Gulf of Mexico… and that water was cold!
The light and keeper’s quarters at St. Marks are framed, picture-perfect, by a live oak. The lighthouse lies at the mouth of the St. Marks River on Apalachee Bay; a beautiful spot.
4 in my 39 by 40.
Otterly adorable
🙂
(Guess who finally got to the zoo?!?)
Things that make me smile
Horses in blankets
Red-tails when they perch close together
Comfortable jeans
Luka
This video and Josh Turner
😉
(gosh… he’s cute!)
Letting someone else give me what I want
Hay in my hair
Men with flowers sedges
Airports
Sanderlings
Other people’s kids
A reluctant smile from the DH
Stories.
(I love stories!)
The smell behind a bunny’s ears
Skimmers and their barking
Handwritten letters
Weekends
(This is an ongoing list, I think…)
Freedom
When your eyes are tired the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own.
There you can be sure you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb tonight.
The night will give you a horizon further than you can see.
You must learn one thing: the world was meant to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn that anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you…
~David Whyte
Lower range light at Baileys Harbor, Wisconsin
4/100
I’ve sort of fallen off the bandwagon the last month or so with my stranger pics… probably I’ve lost my nerve for it, but this guy…
Hmm.
Everything about him wanted to be photographed, I think.
😉
I dashed up to him across the jetty, asked his permission, snapped the photo and dashed off… feeling really, really embarrassed.
I wonder what it is that makes a stranger feel approachable enough to me…
I wonder what it is that makes a stranger interesting enough…
I wonder why I haven’t had the nerve yet to approach a woman…
This photo is #4 in my 100 strangers project. Find out more about the project and see pictures taken by other photographers at Flickr 100 Strangers or www.100Strangers.com
Ruddy turnstone
Other names: Sea dotterel; Sea quail; Sand-runner; Stone-pecker; Horsefoot snipe; Brant-bird; Bead-bird; Checkered snipe; Red-legs; Red-legged plover; Chicken plover; Calico-back; Calico-jacket; Sparked-back; Streaked-back; Chuckatuck; Creddock; Jinny; Bishop plover.
… I had an exceptional chance to watch… The select company was “one little Turnstone and I,” the latter armed with binoculars, the former too busy to notice intruders. He was a fine gentleman, dressed in the gaudiest calico possible for the fall fashions, yet not too proud to work for his supper. His method was not unlike that of the proverbial bull in the china shop, for he trotted about, tossing nearly everything that came in his way. Inserting the wedge of his bill under a pebble, a shell, or what not, he would give a real toss of his imperious head, and flop over it would go. His efforts seemed to be well rewarded, for he fed there for some time. It is in search of such prey that the turner of stones operates, a cog in the wheel of the system of nature, which decrees that every possible corner and crevice of the great system shall have its guardian, even the tiny spot of ground beneath the pebble on the beach.
Info from Birds of America, first published in 1917 and which includes color plates of Louis Agassiz Fuertes’ paintings. Said book made for good company this evening.
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The Turnstones were not so much trotting about as they were, instead, slip-sliding along the jetty rocks yesterday while they fed. There were no stones to be turned; in fact I wondered just what they were finding edible among the waves.
Sea dog, jetty birds and the distance
A return trip today to Barnegat Light with the Monmouth County Audubon Society was graced by many of the same species as last week’s visit, plus a new one!
This harbor seal had hauled itself up onto the rocks of a small jetty behind the lighthouse to rest and soak up some sun, much to our delight. They’re fairly common here in winter, but this is the closest I’ve ever seen one. They have small rounded heads and whiskered snouts, but it’s their huge and soulful eyes that establish the resemblance with a more blubbery version of man’s best friend.
Click for whisker views!
It was really sweet to watch it nearly tipping off the rocks as it napped! The seal seemed well aware of, yet unconcerned with the group of admirers that had gathered at the base of the lighthouse to watch it.
Many thanks to Steve for letting me use his big lens for these closer-up views.
High tide and a heavy surf had rearranged the sea ducks and shorebirds in new patterns. The jetty was impossibly dangerous today… so hardly any harlequins were within view, but the crashing waves beyond the jetty were black with ducks!
😉
There were big numbers of long-tails and lots of scoters (black and surf) close within the inlet, disappearing and reappearing behind the swells… a real treat! I also saw quite a few common eiders looking just like the field guides say they should… sweet!
(Of course there’s no pictures… I wasn’t about to climb up on the jetty and get soaking wet or worse.)
The purple sandpipers, dunlin, ruddy turnstones and a lone sanderling were mostly feeding on the lee side of the jetty… out of the wind and the crashing waves. They’re all so inconspicuous somehow, looking like nothing more than jetty rock, until you realize that the rocks are moving and alive with birds.
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I often wonder why in the world I do this… why I stand out in the cold until my hands and lips are numb… just to see birds that I’ve seen any number of times before in much less awful conditions?
It’s mostly ritual, I think, like waiting for woodcock in an early spring dusk or estimating the number of swallows that might rise from the phragmites at North Pond on a late summer dawn.
What’s not often mentioned among birders is the time spent scanning the horizon, that distant magic place where sky and sea or sky and land converge to ignite the imagination. The time spent looking at nothing. You have to be patient when you look there. You might not see anything new… or see anything at all, but you have to look and wait, just in case.
Some people don’t ever want to look into that distance. Some people won’t tolerate the discomfort of it.
(Wimps!)
Sometimes the best thing I find while scanning that distance is inside me, anyway.
Images: Barnegat Light
Some more pics that might’ve been included in yesterday’s post…
Beth and her friend Kathy traveled all the way from Pa. and had HAD ENOUGH by the time we met in the parking lot at midday. While the weather was beautiful… usually I think of Barnegat Light as the coldest place on earth… the brisk wind had brought out the apples on sweet Beth’s cheeks.
🙂
This would, I think, make a nice quiz photo for those, like me, who are terror-stricken by shorebirds. At least in wintertime, the possibilities are somewhat limited.
Sleepy dunlin (I think… though I was at first convinced they were purple sandpipers), an orange-legged ruddy turnstone, and a sweet spotty-flanked black-belly plover.
(Take all those ID’s with a grain of salt, of course.)
I love how tame shorebirds can be in winter and am amazed with how they find comfort together on these wind-swept jetties.
Harlequins… what sweet little sea ducks!
They weren’t close in to the lighthouse this time, like they usually are…
Instead they were feeding way out at the end of the jetty, with a happy group of photographers closeby.
(I was a wimp and walked along the sand, instead of on those treacherous rocks.)
Oldsquaw (long-tailed ducks) are a favorite… for their pink-tipped bills and their calls… nothing says winter to me like that sound echoing in the wind.
The day was ended near Manahawkin with hopes for short-eared owls hunting like butterflies over the marsh at dusk.
There were none, but that matters little, really. For all the frigid sunsets I’ve lingered in to spot one with no success… the couple times I have seen them in the low-slanted light of a winter afternoon serve my memory well enough that the hope of them keeps me coming back to wait, just in case.
Moments: Barnegat Light
Once past the terror of the jetty rocks, a rush of wind and an expanse of space… and ducks.
Birders caught in a quandry about the identity of the long-tailed (or are they pin-tailed?) ducks paddling and diving along the inlet at Old Barney’s feet.
(A good enough reason for me to continue calling them oldsquaw… politically incorrect or no…)
The oddly painted costume of the harlequin duck is distinct and well worth the hours long drive to see them.
Random teeterings and dawdlings of dunlin, turnstone and purple sandpiper.
Tears that come at the memory of another visit here, a lifetime ago. I turn around confounded by the wall of wind… heedless of how fast and far I’ve come.
I try to imagine this place in summer, as most would know it… waves glitter a thousand small suns, the long rhythm of the surf, a herring gull’s call like a rusty pulley, the clatter and crunch of periwinkles, scallops and skate egg casings, the sight of a black skimmer slitting the seam between two worlds.
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See any good birds yourself this weekend?
😉
Oh… and I ran into Beth out ogling the harlequins! Small world…