Rat Snake





Yellow rat snake



Black rat snake.








Here’s a rat snake in action:


Fairytale Of New York




A belated response to the Daily Press weekly photo challenge: Oops!

I am an utterly hopeless bird photographer. My camera is bad for it, but on top of that, I’m  bad at it. The only birds I have ever successfully photographed have been at the beach, where there is tons of bright light and the birds are more or less standing still.

Any other bird? It looks semi-okay on my camera’s little screen, but then I get it onto my computer and, wow. What is that, even? Is that a bird? It just looks like a blurry, grainy, underexposed mess.

This is one of my better attempts.

Harbingers of Spring

Some animals live their lives on a strict annual timetable. Migratory birds set off about the same time each year. Hibernating animals start stuffing themselves and building up insulation-fat at the same time. Many species have reproductive cycles that match the seasons.

Some are so predictable and noticeable that they can come to symbolize a season. When the sandhill cranes arrive at the lake near my parents’ house, it is fall. When I lived there, in northern Florida, the sight of a swallow-tailed kite drifting gracefully through the sky meant summer was arriving. I have always liked summer, even in Florida where many hate it, so a glimpse of a kite always made me smile, and not just because they are beautiful. Which they certainly are. I don’t have a good photo of one in flight, so here’s a video:

ARKive video - Swallow-tailed kite - overview

But long before I lived in Florida, I lived in a much colder place: northwestern Pennsylvania. That area gets a lot of snow, and while they’re used to it, everyone is pretty sick of it by March. The earliest signs of spring are important. Spring there is announced by two sounds: the calls of Canada geese flying north, and the deafening chorus of spring peepers from every creek and roadside ditch that isn’t frozen.

IMGP0774 Continue reading Harbingers of Spring

A common enemy…

Not a nature photo. This is a response to the Daily Post’s photo challenge theme: Gathering.

This is a photo from the Moral Monday protests in Raleigh, NC last year. This protest was polite, organized, and huge. There were groups there supporting civil rights, labor unions, public education at all levels, immigration, environment, healthcare… you name the cause, the state government had damaged it.

There were poor elderly people from the middle of nowhere talking to young grad students. There were Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Unitarian Universalist leaders on stage. There were people who normally wouldn’t necessarily dislike each other, but who would just never see one another in their everyday lives, holding hands and holding signs and cheering for each other’s causes. There were signs in English, Spanish, and Arabic. There may have been other languages.

You want to get a bunch of disparate people all working together? Give them a really awful governor.

Reblog: Your Wild City – Greenshield Lichen

About Greenshield Lichen -Lichens are amazing. They’re a fusion of multiple life forms: a fungus plus an alga, cyanobacterium, or both, growing intertwined. The fungus eats the sugars that its partner makes from sunlight. Greenshield Lichen (Flavoparmelia caperata) is comfortable growing on city trees so long as the pollution isn’t too bad. It

Source: Your Wild City – Greenshield Lichen

Wolf Spider vs. Green Anole



But sometimes… Sometimes, a spider defies its destiny.

Victory goes to the spider this time.


This week’s DP Photo Challenge theme was “Ornate.”



This Passiflora incarnata flower is an example of the latter.

I don’t do this often enough.


