Picture-A-Week 2021 - Week 20

[pierces]

Pictures taken between Monday, May 10 and Sunday, May 16.

 

Spring has sprung! Get out there and take more pictures!

 

Rules: See above

That's it. This isn't a contest.

All photos taken this week are welcome (not just cruising).

Prizes will not be awarded. Discovering the joy of photography is the prize.

The idea is to get folks out using their cameras for more than vacations and toddler birthdays.

Post one. Post many. Up to you.

Have fun with your camera and share your fun with others!

[Tahitianbigkahuna]

A few from the garden this morning ... Sony RX10IV

 

 

Heading for the feeder

 

Orioles are a bit hesitant letting me get close

 

Love Tit Mouses

Edited May 10, 2021 by Tahitianbigkahuna

[Tahitianbigkahuna]

One from the garden this morning ... Sony RX10IV

 

 

[Tahitianbigkahuna]

From the garden this morning, Mr. Robin ... Sony RX10IV

[Tahitianbigkahuna]

Early morning light  ... in the Mulberry tree in our garden yesterday.

 

[Tahitianbigkahuna]

Yesterday in the garden ...

 

[Tahitianbigkahuna]

Yesterday n the garden ...

[Tahitianbigkahuna]

What? None of you know how to take a picture?

[pierces]

This week featured a break from the state sponsored solitude we have been dealing with for a year. We had two of the the grandcritters for a couple of days while their parents attended an out of town wedding and thought that taking a couple of days off to visit the San Diego Zoo would be an effective way to ease their separation anxiety. Turns out, we were right. The zoo was sort of disorganized with a lot of empty exhibits and no tour buses but is still one of the world’s best. We all followed the science (behavioral control theory, not epidemiology) and had a great time despite some oxygen deprivation caused by the mandated masks. A pleasant stay at a nice hotel finished off a great trip. Walking miles with a couple of great kids made us feel young again. (No it didn’t.)

 

Burning Bright

 

 

 

 

Dave

[boeckli]

No - spring has not sprung (at least not down-under 🙃) - quite the contrary 🍁 🍂

Which is what prompted me to go on a week-long bus tour to enjoy autumn (fall) foliage across the Australian alpine region.

 

 

[Tahitianbigkahuna]

On 5/16/2021 at 7:06 AM, pierces said:

This week featured a break from the state sponsored solitude we have been dealing with for a year. We had two of the the grandcritters for a couple of days while their parents attended an out of town wedding and thought that taking a couple of days off to visit the San Diego Zoo would be an effective way to ease their separation anxiety. Turns out, we were right. The zoo was sort of disorganized with a lot of empty exhibits and no tour buses but is still one of the world’s best. We all followed the science (behavioral control theory, not epidemiology) and had a great time despite some oxygen deprivation caused by the mandated masks. A pleasant stay at a nice hotel finished off a great trip. Walking miles with a couple of great kids made us feel young again. (No it didn’t.)

 

Burning Bright

 

 

 

 

Dave

 

Come on Dave ... snapping pictures at the Zoo is like me hunting birds in an aviary. 

Now if you had taken the picture in the wild and it looked like that I'd be impressed 😛

 

 

 

[pierces]

3 hours ago, Tahitianbigkahuna said:

 

Come on Dave ... snapping pictures at the Zoo is like me hunting birds in an aviary. 

Now if you had taken the picture in the wild and it looked like that I'd be impressed 😛

 

 

 

 

It's a Tiger... I don' live in Texas after all!

 

Referring to my bird pic in the For the Birds thread...give me some credit, the little bugger was FAST! He was free to fly in a huge aviary and only perched for about 4 seconds! 😉

 

 

FYI, I live in a part of California covered by city and before that, it was a semi-arid desert biome. Our birds, except for a slightly blue Scrub Jay, are mostly Sparrows and Crows with an occasional Seagull if you get close enough to a landfill. I'm not a birder and really haven't geared up to seriously shoot them. Even my Mossberg 500 Tactical usually has 3" 00 buckshot ammo loaded in it and that is very ill-suited for shooting birds! (Kidding.) I really enjoy all the bird images here but having lived all my life in this area, I just never developed a desire to seek them out. 

 

You guys keep up the bird shots. They are beautiful and apparently quite popular here!

 

Happy shooting!

 

Dave

Edited May 17, 2021 by pierces

[Tahitianbigkahuna]

1 hour ago, pierces said:

 

It's a Tiger... I don' live in Texas after all!

 

Referring to my bird pic in the For the Birds thread...give me some credit, the little bugger was FAST! He was free to fly in a huge aviary and only perched for about 4 seconds! 😉

 

 

FYI, I live in a part of California covered by city and before that, it was a semi-arid desert biome. Our birds, except for a slightly blue Scrub Jay, are mostly Sparrows and Crows with an occasional Seagull if you get close enough to a landfill. I'm not a birder and really haven't geared up to seriously shoot them. Even my Mossberg 500 Tactical usually has 3" 00 buckshot ammo loaded in it and that is very ill-suited for shooting birds! (Kidding.) I really enjoy all the bird images here but having lived all my life in this area, I just never developed a desire to seek them out. 

 

You guys keep up the bird shots. They are beautiful and apparently quite popular here!

 

Happy shooting!

 

Dave

 

Dave ... I'm a 5th generation Californian. And I still live in California 😉

[pierces]

1 hour ago, Tahitianbigkahuna said:

 

Dave ... I'm a 5th generation Californian. And I still live in California 😉

 

Then you know how many "Californias" there are! Up and down its length, California has an amazingly diverse ecology, most of which is still beautiful despite the three types of recurring major disasters we have to live with. My semi-arid suburb is less than an hour's drive from a mountainous pine forest and about the same to the ocean. I am also one of about 20 million people in the area who can say the same thing. Around here, racoons are considered rare and exotic animals. 🙂

 

Dave

[zackiedawg]

Looks like a pretty active backyard Tahitian!  Nice selection of birds - my backyard is probably 20x as populated with birds, but they're all the same 4 species (dove, blue jay, cardinal, grackle).

 

I have to go to the wetlands to find the more interesting critters and diversity...here's Saturday's haul:

 

This little butterfly was once one of the most common bugs in Florida at the turn of the 20th century - by the 1950s it was thought to be extinct.  It only lays its eggs on one plant, the coontie...that plant was heavily harvested in the early part of the century for their edible starch, and with the plant went the butterfly.  An island off Miami proved to still have some plants and butterflies in the late 1970s, and once determined to not be extinct, efforts were made to bring back the atala butterfly from the brink.  Based on this year's batch, with dozens of the atala chrysalides on every coontie plant at the wetlands, they're back, baby!  The atala butterfly:

 

A red-shouldered hawk attempting to have a nice afternoon flight over the wetlands to look for food - unfortunately, one of its potential meals decided to hound him and follow him everywhere, nipping and grabbing at his tailfeathers, to keep him away from the red-winged blackbird nests and chicks all around:

 

Another of the birds upset with the hawk's flyover - the black-necked stilts, which are sitting on their eggs all around the muddy islands.  The stilt male will jump up and fly after any bird that comes by, large or small, to protect his nest and mom with the eggs:

 

This crow was trying to eat some nasty looking leftovers, which appeared to be remnants of a muskrat that a hawk likely left behind - but kept getting harassed by purple martins for sitting too close to their house:

 

Blue dasher dragonfly perched on a reed:

 

This cooter turtle seemed to have his own Mt. Everest in his sights - he was working on climbing as high up onto this palm tree as he dared with that heavy shell and precarious balance:

 

Sometimes in late spring and into early summer, some of our grey squirrels go through a skin infection similar to mange - they get some sores and lose patches of hair - it doesn't seem to affect them long-term, other than looking less 'cute'.  This one was dealing with his embarrassing outbreak just fine - I was in the pool having a swim after a day in the hot wetlands, and he came over to grab a drink - giving me a nice water-level view from inside the pool:

[Tahitianbigkahuna]

Nice set ... enjoyed the story line

[ski ww]

We were out on our bikes on our local bike trail and saw a muskrat & a couple of turtles.

 

[dileep]

[PurpleHays]

Dang, that's a lot of turtles!