When you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do.
Winter has lost its newness and its luster and I find myself alert for the small voices that signal change…
Without any snow cover there’s little to contrast the lack of color in the landscape if we don’t look closely…
The change now, in mid-February, is in increasing daylight as the sun swings north again…
That light and the sogginess it brings underfoot, the extra brightness it adds to shrunken viburnum berries…
And the fragile texture of butterfly wings that it reveals among the tatters of last summer’s hydrangea…
All are among the small voices that signal hope for change. Have you gone looking, yet, for Spring?
Mostly I didn’t find much, but there are snowdrops in the neighbor’s garden and the promise of hellebores… can peepers be long off? Cardinals are singing some at first light and the redtails perching closer together… maybe it’s closer than it feels.
😉
The beach at Asbury Park 2/4/09 
…the pond at his feet was frozen solid at mid-week. It was fifty degrees today, so I imagine the GB Heron is looking a little less cranky today.
😉
(Probably not.)
I have this series of almost funny pics of Luka playing with his basketball in the snow yesterday; he’s all googly-eyed and acting his normal goofy self.
This last one, his serious face, is my favorite. He’s concerned that my attention has wavered from him and the act he puts on for the camera. I’d spotted a pair of red tails perched in the black locust at the corner edge of our yard and was planning a way to get closer to them without spooking them from their perch.
He’s plotting what silly move of his will have me giggling his way again…
Snowy boardwalk reflection at Asbury Park 
More silly parlor tricks… now if only I could train him not to shred the phone bill.
I did the loop around Lake Takanassee as something of an afterthought on my way home from the bird observatory this afternoon. I wasn’t expecting anything new; hoping for a couple Canvasbacks maybe, or just a closer look at the couple Ring-Neck Ducks that are in the big lake since their more secluded spot is frozen over.
I’d finished sorting through the Coot, and the Canada Geese, the couple Brant and the sweet Wigeon, ready to drive away when a lone Hooded Merganser on the far side of the lake caught my eye. Mainly it was the Great Black-Backed Gulls harassing the Hoodie that got my attention. I’d read about this behavior in those big burly gulls, but had never witnessed it myself.
I didn’t know what I was seeing and misinterpreted it, of course. The gulls repeatedly lifted the Hoodie out of the water, as if to fly away with it for lunch, but then dropped it back in a splash. Horrible mean gulls! The Hoodie kept diving under the water to escape, only to be taken aloft again. Poor thing! At this point I was out of the car, finally remembering my camera and with murder in my heart.
😉
It wasn’t until I got home and enlarged my pics, that I figured out what I’d really seen. The gulls were scared off by something… me maybe… and the Hoodie swam close to shore to rearrange its hard won prize. What I’d imagined to be a mouthful of fishing wire and hooks or some such other horrible death for this duck, was instead a crayfish, I think.
Lunch.
That he had no intention of sharing with any gull.
😉
Click on this pic to enlarge… it’s hilarious!
Looking at these pics, I’m reminded of those I’ve seen of GB Herons and their ministrations when *handling* prey items that are a bit too big for them. But Hooded Mergansers? Who knew? See how he’s stretching out his neck to let it slide down?
Gulp!
This whole time, of course, I was convinced that my favorite duck in the world was choking and dying mere yards away.
😉
Hoodies can smile with their crests, I think. Can you see the relief on his face?
Once home I read that crayfish are a favored food for these ducks and that they have a special gizzard-type thing, like chickens I guess, to process the hard shells of crustaceans.
Something else I read said that they only eat the claws of crayfish, like us with their bigger cousins, but I have no idea how he actually managed to get that thing down his throat, if he had to shake away the body first, before swallowing the sweet bits.
Birds. Always something new to learn.
😉
When you sit, just sit. Boomer with a real dustbunny, for size-comparison.
With silver-frosted muzzle and eyes hazy with age, an old wolf lives out his days captive to the benevolence of his more robust packmates.
At sixteen or so, this one was among the oldest of the wolves at the Lakota Preserve and had been ousted from his position as Alpha in another pack. The fight very nearly killed him, or would have, had it not been for his caretakers who’d had his throat sewn back together and his blinded eye tended to. He was relocated to a different pen with another, gentler, pack where he’s been accepted in his new submissive role.
Despite his submissiveness with the other members of the pack, he was quite confident and unaffraid with people, yet tame enough to be hand fed biscuits through the fence.
Diminished though they may be by captivity and I believe they must be, this is the wolf – the symbol of wildness for many. In them we see something unrestrained and noble, something ancient and fear-inducing. Much of that mystery is reduced, I think, by the high chain link separating us, but some is still there in the aloofness they carry with them, even as they submit themselves to our wide eyes.
