An alligator's smile

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to dogs who can hedgehog again.”
Luke 2:13-14, more or less

Where were you this morning? Did you see the heavens open? Did you hear the angels rejoice?

I know one dog who did.

Ellie had her final visit to the surgeon today and Dr. Munjar said the x-rays showed a nice boring joint, meaning she had healed nicely and we can start easing her back into her normal routine. Ellie and I celebrated with a few hedeghog throws in the backyard before I had to head in to work.

If you’re in the Portland area and need surgery for your pet, I highly recommend Dr. Munjar and the Veterinary Surgical Center of Portland. Dr. Munjar has a great (doggy) bedside manner and explained everything very clearly and did great work. He provided detailed instructions for her post-op recovery and everything proceeded just like he said. From the moment we met him we felt we had made the right decision. The staff is friendly and knowledgable and took good care of us.

If I ever need surgery I can only hope to be in such good hands!

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.

Has anybody seen the white-breasted nuthatch? It was right here, I swear!

Some birds go to great lengths to discourage predators from raiding their nests. This white-breasted nuthatch went the route of disguise, using a grub as a fake mustache.

Cleaning out the nursery

An oak gall provides a natural perch for a house wren as it carries debris out of its nest. While the wren’s little beak is fine for excavating debris, it’s not much use at excavating the cavity itself. Like many forest residents, this house wren used a pre-existing cavity drilled by woodpeckers. I took many pictures but most came out blurry thanks to the frenetic pace with which the little bird hurled the debris from its new home.

This great horned owl kept its fledglings on a short leash

This great horned owl kept a close eye on its recently fledged youngsters over the course of several weeks. The owls were usually in sight from the auto tour at Ridgefield and became the stars of the spring at the refuge. I saw them many times but usually not in great light, so it was nice to see them in the warm light near sunset. Unfortunately the gates of the refuge close fairly early so I had to leave the owls before I wanted and head towards the exit.

What say? I can't hear you, my head is turned!

Ellie did really well during her recovery, but she did develop a coping mechanism — if I gave her a command she didn’t want to follow, she’d turn her head slightly to the side. As if to say, “I’m not being willfully disobedient, it’s just that I can’t hear you, what with my head turned like this and all.” It was such a subtle gesture I didn’t catch on at first, but after a while it became unmistakable.

I suppose I should be insulted at my dog’s estimate of my intelligence, but it was so cute it just made me laugh. She’d always obey if my tone indicated she needed to, so I let it slide.

In muskrat society, it's rude to not eat with your hands.

Muskrats have brown fur like most of our aquatic rodents, but they aren’t solid brown. They have white patches near the tip of their nose and white bellies, and especially when their fur is wet you can see the white at the base of their brown fur.

The muskrats at Ridgefield tend to be pretty skittish so I was surprised when this one didn’t bolt as I came up on it as I walked the forested section of the auto tour in late spring. The chubby little thing didn’t let my presence dissuade it from feeding plants into its mouth, usually with both hands, and let me watch for as long as I wanted.

See, not every bird picture I take is a tight close-up

While photographing a bee swarm at Ridgefield, off in the distance there was a quick flash of red. When I looked up this male pileated woodpecker was hammering into the soft wood, allowing a few quick shots before flying off into the distance.

Pileateds are our largest woodpecker in the United States, unless of course the ivory-billed is only mostly extinct.

Lady Em the Affectionate

Emma is not a lap cat but she is affectionate. When you live in the land of the Snuggle Twins and the 70 lb. lap dog, however, finding that affection isn’t so easy. Emma has solved this dilemma by waiting for me to play with Ellie and then running up tight beside me to be petted with one hand while I play with Ellie with the other.

But one day I noticed her on a ledge near the bathroom after I took a shower and took a few minutes to let her play in my wet hair. Since then she’s became a regular customer and is often there to greet me when I step out of the shower.

Eventually I set her on the bed and laid down and patted my chest and to my surprise, she jumped right up and started rubbing her head against mine and chirping her birdie purrs. Our one-on-one snuggles have now become a morning ritual, although they don’t always last for long, one of the others will usually sniff out that snuggling is afoot and jump up with us.

A house wren uses it beak to preen its tail feathers

It took me a while to warm up to the little brown birds in general and house wrens in particular. But this spring I had a few nice encounters with house wrens and now I’m hooked. This wren gave me a spectacular view of its long tail feathers when it flew onto a rotten tree branch to preen.

The blue bee eater

Scrub jays do not belong to the class of birds known as bee-eaters that specialize in eating bees, but nonetheless this one had a strong predilection for them. A colony of bees had taken up residence in a cavity of this tree, and the jay used a nearby rock as a launching off point to fly in to snare one of the bees before returning to the rock to eat it.

Not much later the colony split and sent a swarm off to establish a new colony, so now the jay can dine out when the mood strikes.

Keep arms and legs inside the ride at all times!

Easier said then done when centrifugal forces are at work.

Sam hiding in the raspberries

Literally minutes after taking one of my favorite pictures of Ellie, I snapped one of my favorite pictures of Sam. Of course I have many favorites of our photogenic feline, there’s silent Sam, snowy Sam, snuggly Sam, scary Sam, sleepy Sam, shadowy Sam, scrunchy Sam, and so many others.

Bees! Bees! Bees!

I was taken with the dramatic black-and-yellow pattern of the bees hanging in formation, but even more so with the co-operation of the colony as bees constantly flew into and out of the living, wriggling mass. Even though they stepped all over one another, they all seemed to take it in stride and focused on their common goal.

I like the wrong-way driver in the lower left corner who is upside down as she finds her way into the swarm.

A bee swarm hangs together despite the heavy rain

After first finding the bee swarm one cool spring morning, I was both pleased and concerned to find them still there the next day on a warmer but wetter morning. Despite looking like a solid mass, the swarm was anchored by the bees on top to some mossy branches while the bees below were just hanging on to each other. The mass of bees must have gotten much heavier in the rain, but these stout workers up top held their ground. They also took the brunt of the rain, the bee in the upper left is covered with a drop of rain as large as her head.

I hope they survived the wet weather and were able to find a new colony before they starved to death. I wasn’t able to get back to the refuge until the next week and by then they would have long since either established a new colony or died off. I didn’t see any little bee carcasses on the ground, I took that as a hopeful sign.

My two days with the bees did highlight how I need to get a new tripod and ballhead better suited to the weight of the big lens, I was using it for these shots to keep as much distance between myself and the bees as I could — even in their quiet state I wasn’t taking chances — and even with a remote release vibration ruined many of the shots.

I also need a new raincoat, mine has been shedding its waterproof lining and doesn’t keep me so dry anymore. The camera and lens have some weather-sealing but I also draped them in a heavy old bath towel and stooped below it to take a picture like an old-time photographer.

A black-tailed doe in the rain

After posting that I finally had gotten a picture of a deer at Ridgefield that I liked, the very next morning I arrived early in a heavy rain and found a doe and buck just past the entrance gate and before getting onto the refuge proper. I parked my car in a little pullout, rolled down the window, and draped a towel over the door to protect the insides from the rain. I watched the two of them for quite some time, I had the refuge to myself as apparently others don’t like the rain as much as I do.

I got this close look at the damp doe as she grazed in a small meadow at the top of the refuge. There used to be a lot of other meadows in the area even just a couple of years ago but they’ve been plowed under as Ridgefield has exploded into a bedroom community for Portland and Vancouver.