August 2016

Foraging
Bozeman, Montana
2016

Frustrated by the difficulty in capturing the non-stop dragonflies, I turned my camera momentarily on this finch foraging its way through the grass around the pond. Of course the minute I did that, it decided to fly off. Still it was easier to track and I got this interesting action shot.

Never Stop
Bozeman, Montana
2016

We have a lot of dragonflies flitting around our ponds these days, so I thought I’d try to get a few shots of them. It turns out these critters never stop flying, at least anywhere that I can see them. They might hover in one spot very briefly but before you can get the camera pointed at them, much less get it focused, they have usually moved on. So it turns out it was a pretty effective way of burning through a Sunday afternoon. Of maybe 500 shots total, I got only a couple of good, well-focused images. (Thank goodness I wasn’t using film!)

I’m afraid there is more than a little Mr. Toad in me sometimes.

Empty Nest #6
Bozeman, Montana
2016

I thought I’d try one in this series in monochrome. I believe I like the subtle color images better. This is actually two old robins nests.

Empty Nest #5
Bozeman, Montana
2016

House wrens build interesting nests. They pile up these big piles of rough twigs and then line a small depression in the very top with nice soft material. This one only started to get past the rough twig phase when the builders for some reason abandoned it.

Empty Nest #4
Bozeman, Montana
2016

Empty Nest #3
Bozeman, Montana
2016

More fake eggs–too big for this nest! I’ve noticed that the robin nests around our house always contain a number of strands of sagebrush. I wonder if that is just because it is a convenient source of nest material or if there is an additional advantage, say for parasite control. (I read that sage does help with such things, when taken internally anyway.) Or maybe they just like the smell.

Cowboy Moon
Bozeman, Montana
2016

So this misquoted line came to my head on a walk the other day: “….and the cowboy jumped over the moon.” What made me think in terms of fractured fairy tales I don’t know; perhaps a residual of watching too many episodes of Rocky and Bullwinkle back in the formative years of my youth.

Apparently to this day there still exists a genre of literature (illustrated or otherwise) devoted to fractured fairy tales. Perhaps the most controversial and disgusting of these come from the NRA who armed characters such as Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel in rewrites of their misadventures.

Empty Nest #2
Bozeman, Montana
2016

The egg is plastic; the robin’s nest and other items are all real.

Lives Real and Imagined #43
Bozeman, Montana
2016