Normally I visit Ridgefield without a specific agenda in mind, but on this day I went under strict orders from Ellie to scout out her competition in the Greater Ridgefield Hedgehog Invitational. She had nothing to worry about.
Now when it comes time for the Townsend’s Vole Catching Competition, on the other hand …
I try to show the weather in my wildlife pictures whenever possible as I’m fascinated by how the animals have to adapt to whatever conditions the day holds. I’m especially excited to head to Ridgefield when the weather reports predict a hard frost as it rarely gets cold enough to turn the meadows white. But when it does, I want to be there as soon as the gates open so I can try to find a subject in the frosted landscape before the sun melts it all away.
There are other hardcore birders and photographers who also are there when the gates open, at least when it isn’t raining, so it can be hard to get off on my own. Such was the case on the morning when I and several others came across this coyote. I took a few quick pictures before moving on to let others have a look, unfortunately the pictures didn’t come out as sharp as I would have liked.
I was off on my own on a rainy spring day when I spotted this coyote through a tunnel of green grass, a look I love, and had a few seconds before it slipped into the tall grass. At first glance I thought there might be something wrong with it, it seemed gaunt with patchy fur. But on closer look its fur was soaked and clinging to its skin, and a look at its belly made me wonder if it had recently given birth.
There are many animals in Petroglyph National Monument, not all of which are carved in the rocks
Coyotes are adaptable creatures — tolerating a varied diet of both plant and animal life, living in climates hot and cold and wet and dry, and even living in close quarters with humans. My wife and I came across this coyote a few years ago while hiking in Rinconada Canyon in New Mexico’s Petroglpyh National Monument. It was one of a pair that were working their way up the canyon.
I’m not sure if I’m going to win NaNoWriMo this year.
I did well in 2005, starting out strong on day one and the words kept flowing until I met the goal of 50,000 words almost a week early. This year, while I’m making steady progress (click on the NaNo Stats tab to see a chart of my daily totals versus where I should be), at the moment I’m way behind.
Which has surprised me, as I know what I want to write.
I didn’t get off to a strong start, on Halloween I was laid low by a nasty headache and didn’t eat a single piece of candy, a first for me. So rather than start off writing at midnight, I went to bed instead, continued slow for the first few days and am still struggling to get back on track.
I thought I would get caught up yesterday, it was windy and pouring rain all day long, a good day to stay inside instead of doing yardwork. But Ellie was in a mood yesterday and wanted to play hedgehog all day long, so combined with another headache I didn’t write as much as I hoped.
And then there is the devil in hot shoes, the Canon 7D, that I ordered on Friday and which will be here tomorrow. It’s gone from Phoenix to Oakland and has already arrived in Portland (not that I’m checking frequently) and I’m resisting the urge to go down and raid the UPS depot. There is enough new stuff on the camera compared to my old ones that I’ll need to spend some time reading the manual, time I would have spent writing.
And of course there will be pictures to be taken, to play around with the new auto-focus and see how it compares to what I’m used to, as the AF has been a weak spot on past cameras. While the Internet is abuzz about it’s ability to track BIF’s — birds in flight — that’s not my biggest concern. As you may have noticed, for someone who photographs a lot of birds, I don’t often photograph them in flight as I don’t find the results to be that interesting, unless the wings are flared coming in for a landing.
I’m more interested in MIF’s — mammals in fields — or even ducks in the water. And low-contrast subjects, like a black bear on a cloudy day, where my past cameras have been fairly useless for AF.
So hopefully I can still find the time for 50,000 words, but what I really wanted was to get back into a writing groove after a long layoff, and win or lose that’s my ultimate goal.
I was watching this coyote late one spring day but couldn’t quite figure out what it was doing as it was mostly obscured in the tall grass. At first, I assumed it was hunting for voles, as I’ve seen other coyotes do in these fields. However, it kept carrying the animals it was catching over to one spot and then coming back for more. No coyote hunts voles that sucessfully, so then I thought perhaps it was ferrying its pups from one spot to another. When I saw it eat one of the animals it was carrying I knew it wasn’t carrying pups, and my third guess at what was happening turned out to be the correct one.
The natural world is a harsh one and one of the consequences is that some of my favorite creatures eat some of my favorite creatures. What I came to realize was that this coyote had found a den of rabbits and was catching all of the baby bunnies and storing them in a nearby cache, while eating a couple herself. I watched with mixed fascination and horror as the coyote bounded through the grass and landed on her prey, even as I could hear the surviving bunnies shrieking in alarm.
The coyote eventually came out of the tall grasses not far from where I was standing carrying one of the dead bunnies in her mouth. She might have have been taking the little rabbits back to feed her own, one mother’s children dying to feed another’s.
