Horns aplenty

Ladybugs might not look the part of the predator as adults, but they certainly do as larvae. Is there any other creature that goes from looking so fierce to so cute as it ages?

So dinosaurs aren't extinct!

Some call me bug, though bug I am not.
Some call me bird, though bird I am not.

Who am I?

It's times like these I'm thankful I'm not an aphid

I’m no lady,
at least not yet.

Who am I?

I'll fly when I'm good and ready, thank you very much

Even at such a young age, this part of the owl is less huggable than the previous post. While driving the auto tour at Ridgefield this past May, I came across a few people who had stopped in the forest. Two great horned owls had just fledged, one had taken its first flight but this one wasn’t quite so eager to test its wings.

This is the first shot I took, unfortunately it was severely overexposed but while I took more pictures of the owl, it never again looked at me, apparently unimpressed by my beak and talons. One of the parents was keeping a close eye on its young charge, who was more in a mood to sleep than to learn to fly.

I didn’t see it take the leap that day but for the next month the two young owls could be seen from the road, although much farther into the forest, with one of the adults always close by.

Downy soft

My downy feathers are huggably soft,
My beak and talons are huggably not.

Who am I?

My ladybug hatched! My ladybug hatched!

After finding a ladybug pupa attached to a leaf on one of our daisies, I checked it every day while taking Ellie out for her walk. One day I noticed the pupal shell looking a bit dried out and the reason slowly dawned on me. I grabbed Ellie’s floppy ears and shouted “My ladybug hatched! My ladybug hatched!”

Ellie didn’t share my excitement since this involved neither food nor hedgehogs, but I got even more excited when I realized the newly minted ladybug was on the other side of the leaf, waiting for its wings to dry. I decided to hold off on pictures and took Ellie on her full walk, which in hindsight was pretty risky, but it all worked out. The ladybug was still there when we got back and I ran inside to get the camera and took, oh, let’s just say a few pictures.

When I got up to let our cat Emma back inside, I returned to find the leaf empty. Our yard’s newest predator had taken flight, but not before I got some nice pictures. In this one, the ladybug on the left waits with wings outstretched to dry. On the right is the orange and black shell from which it just emerged.

I’ve been bitten by the ladybug bug this year and am constantly on the lookout for the little beetles in their various states in our backyard. Yesterday I counted four more ladybug pupa on the plants near this daisy, and also got some pictures of one of the ladybug larva.

This is why groundhogs don't get scurvy

You know you’ve been living in Oregon too long when you actually like photographing wildlife in the rain.

Trained by years of hiking in my Portland, I brought along a pair of rain pants on our visit to the other Portland. They were put to good use on this rainy morning, even laying down in the wet grass I stayed nice and dry. The groundhogs were not so fortunate and were soaked through and through. Their wet fur has a bit of a porcupine appearance to it, but the apparent spines are actually the long guard hairs that the shorter underfur has clumped around, nicely showing off the white tips that give the fur a frosted look.

If you’d like to learn more about this lowland marmot, the University of Michigan has a nice writeup on Marmota monax, the groundhog.

Now that's how you eat an apple

I had been visiting Gilsland Farm for several days in a row letting this groundhog get used to me, so it was rather nonplussed when I slowly approached and lay flat on the rain-soaked ground. It worked an apple from start to finish, suddenly raising it high when it was nearly at the core, yielding one of my favorite pictures of the trip.

Hey there Boolie! Long time no see!

Our trip to Maine was not only a chance to meet new friends but also to get reacquainted with some long lost friends as well. Especially the little eastern chipmunk, a staple of my youth that lived in the forest behind our house in Michigan. At least I remember it as a forest, I was young and the runt of the litter to boot so it seemed pretty big to me.

I was just learning photography at the tail end of my graduate career in the mid-90′s, and chipmunks provided some of my earliest successes as I hiked the trails of Pipestem and Bluestone State Parks in West Virginia. Not surprisingly eastern chipmunks were one of the earliest galleries on my website, but over time I took the gallery down since it no longer met my standards.

We moved to Oregon not long after and since then on every trip back east, I’ve tried unsuccessfully to get better pictures of these little creatures. I had better luck in Maine so it is with great pleasure that I am re-introducing eastern chipmunks to the site, taken during our trip to Maine.

Welcome back little ones!

Is it rude if I eat? I only brought enough seeds for myself.

Many feathers, many colors, many patterns, one bird

Ben Franklin once wrote his daughter that a poorly drawn insignia looked less like a bald eagle and more like me, which didn’t displease him since even I would have been a better representative of the young United States than the eagle.

Who am I?

A groundhog uses paw and claw to pull a plant stem close enough to eat

Groundhogs are primarily herbivores, often sitting back on their haunches and pulling plants to their mouths. Their love of plants makes them the enemy of gardeners, which I suppose is why the community gardens at Gilsland Farm Audubon Center were all fenced in.

Rawr!

A yawn can make just about any animal seem ferocious.

Daddy makes one

One of the nice things about visiting Maine to spread my mother-in-law’s ashes was getting to meet many people on her side of the family that I hadn’t met before. The family resemblance was strong in the siblings, but they weren’t the only ones. On a visit to one of the aunts, a family of hairy woodpeckers nicely showed off not only the differences in their plumages but also one of the features that distinguishes them from the similar downy woodpecker — that long glorious beak.

In both hairies and downies, males have a red patch at the back of their heads while females do not. Juveniles have a red patch atop their heads, which my Sibley guide notes is occasionally yellow in hairies. On this particular juvenile the patch was noticeably orange. Another trait shared between downies and hairies is that females tend to have shorter beaks than males, making it more difficult to distinguish between a male downy and female hairy if you don’t get a good look. Complicating matters is that the two species are spread across much of the U.S. and Canada and overlap ranges in most of those regions.

I’m not a top flight birder, so there have been many times where if I don’t get a good look at a bird hammering in the treetops, my field notes just say “downy or hairy woodpecker”. These woodpeckers posed so perfectly, however, that they left little doubt.

Momma makes two

Baby makes three

A multicolored Asian ladybug pupa clings to a daisy leaf

Ladybugs go through several stages before they become adults. They hatch from eggs into the larval stage, where they look more like miniature alligators than cute little ladybugs. After a couple of weeks they enter the pupal stage shown here, where the larva sticks itself onto a plant and the skin splits and protects the pupa underneath. During the next week or so the pupa metamorphoses into an adult and finally emerges as the familiar little beetle we all know and love.

This particular ladybug is a multicolored Asian lady beetle, which is not native to the United States. Ohio State’s extension office has a nice writeup on this (often deliberately) introduced little predator.

A preening tom pauses to show his beautiful face

Snood & Wattle is:

• The long-awaited sequel to Turner & Hooch
• Portland’s newest eatery specializing in Willamette Valley wines
• My nicknames for Sam and Emma
• Red fleshy bits on a turkey’s head

If you’re particularly clever, you might have guessed the answer from the pictures. The snood hangs over the top of the beak while the wattle hangs below.

Such a lovely bird!

A tom gives me the once over

I’m a night owl by nature so one of the hardest lessons in photography for me to take to heart is to be up early and often. The reptilian part of my brain does its best to get me to go back to sleep when the alarm clock rings, so some deeply buried part of my consciousness has to struggle with all its might to win out and get me up and out of bed.

While we were in Maine, it was a little easier to win that battle as I knew I had an opportunity to photograph creatures I’ve rarely seen since moving to the west coast. After visiting Gilsland Farm Audubon Center one afternoon, I returned four more times at sunrise and am glad I did, even if it left me pretty tired by the end of the trip. It was the third and fourth visits that yielded my best pictures, such as this wild turkey that visited to feed most of the mornings of my visit.

The lesson that I need to make the most of my opportunities was further driven home Friday evening, when I was deeply saddened to learn one of my favorite photographers was showing his final images. He picked up his camera for the last time in May as debilitating health problems have left him unable to hold his gear.

You never know.

A dew-soaked groundhog enjoys an apple breakfast

We recently returned to Portland from a trip to Portland.

My mother-in-law wanted her ashes spread near a favorite lighthouse in Maine so the family gathered in the Portland on the east coast and we spent a week visiting relatives in the area. Since it was a family trip and not a photography outing, I left the big lens and tripod at home in the Portland on the west coast. I did bring my camera and two zooms, I didn’t know what to expect but they pack down pretty small and were easy enough to take along even if I didn’t get a chance to use them.

My wife and I discovered the delightful Gilsland Farm Audubon Center in nearby Falmouth, Maine, on our first full day in the state. It was hot and humid and we didn’t expect to see much, but my spirits rose when we discovered groundhogs near the headquarters! Thereafter I started getting up at 4:30am each morning to visit the refuge for a few hours of photography and still got back in time for breakfast before most of the others had gotten up.

In this close-up of one of the adults about to take a big bite out of an apple, you can see an identification tag in its ear. The groundhogs there are being studied and sport tags in both ears.

Based on my studies, I’d say they really like apples.

Yeeeooowww that's cold!

I’ve toyed with the idea of starting a series of pictures about the ones that got away — pictures were I almost got what I was looking for, but one or two things didn’t come together like I hoped.

I spent a lot of time watching this swallow and took some pictures as he sang. Tree swallows don’t usually open wide to sing but they do open wide to yawn. The swallow was several feet above me, so before taking a picture I waited until he angled his head down towards me to get a more pleasing profile. But when he yawned he threw his head back and I couldn’t get the angle I wanted.

The thing I do like about the picture is it reminds me of the expression on Sam’s face after we adopted him as a kitten and took him to the vet for an exam. An instrument was inserted in a place none of us wants instruments to be inserted and a look of great surprise shot across his face.

A male tree swallow peeks out of a tree cavity where it is building its nest

Tree swallows nest in seemingly every tree cavity during the spring at Ridgefield. I love when they poke their heads out of the holes and made an effort to photograph them this spring. For this accommodating swallow I photographed it from both the front and side. It was a cloudy day so I set the exposure to blow the background to white.

A tree swallow in need of a good preening

I had settled in to watch a nuthatch flying back and forth to his nest when I noticed this tree swallow and his mate in the tree not far from me. I shifted my gaze and my camera lens back and forth between the two sets of birds for some time. Since the swallows weren’t disturbed by my presence, I used the opportunity to try some close-up shots of the male.

The male looked a little disheveled with a feather out of place, understandable given the frenetic pace of the nesting season.