What are you up to?

[brianvds]

Brian, especially love that oriole shot. Beautiful!!!

A weaver bird, but they do indeed look quite a bit like orioles.

 

[Terri]

Terri what wonderful news! Congratulations to you and your family!

Brian, these photos and the ones from a few days ago just floored me! You really know how to capture the beauty of nature in your part of the world.

Thank you, Donna!

 

[Triduana]

We had a lovely day out today. We started off at Pittencrief Park, in Dunfermline, about 20 miles north of Edinburgh, so a shame I've never been before! Anyway, it has a peacock sanctuary. It has 14 of them, and they have freedom of the city, meaning they are often seeing wandering along the high street . We only saw one today, maybe the others were down at the shops. This is Hamish, before and after I told him he was pretty:

This is the nearby abbey:

Winter aconite, just about to open

A nice redwood tree

And then we headed to South Queensferry, one of my favourite places, because it has awesome bridges

 

[Artyczar]

What a beautiful day Kay! Thanks for all the gorgeous pictures!

 

[Terri]

What a lovely set of shots, Kay! It does look like you had beautiful weather. I love the peacock!! How cute is it that he sat down after being told he was pretty! Critters....

We're having some mild weather up here in the north US. It won't last but a few more days but I'm enjoying the apparent El Nino intrusion this February! Snow again by the end of next week.

 

[Artyczar]

It snowed here, was it yesterday? Maybe it was the day before, but it was just flakes in the wind. Incredible wind. For many days now, with rain. Today is still and 30 degrees.

 

[brianvds]

It snowed here, was it yesterday? Maybe it was the day before, but it was just flakes in the wind. Incredible wind. For many days now, with rain. Today is still and 30 degrees.

Around here it's also 30 degrees - Celsius, that is.

After weeks of battling it out with weird sprains and tendonitis in my feet, which had me hobbling around on crutches, I have finally healed sufficiently to be able to go do a brief nature walk again...

Lucky shot of an African grass blue - they seldom pose like this, with their wings open.

Black-eyed bulbul.

The lizard scampered away a second after I took the picture.

Walked into a swarm of small insects. This amethyst sunbird was among the birds making a feast of it.

Blesbok pointedly ignoring the paparazzi.

Grass flowers have their own subtle, subdued beauty. This is turpentine grass, so called for the aroma of turpentine it gives off.

 

[Artyczar]

Beautiful photos Brian!

 

[Terri]

Wow, sorry to hear your feet were giving you that much trouble, Brian. Glad you're better now, and back out shooting. What a gorgeous butterfly that is! Lovely shots.

 

[brianvds]

Been indulging my hobby of pretentious artsy photography. Some of these might make for nice, if pretty much unmarketable, paintings...

These all from this morning's walk through the neighborhood - the first I have been able to take in weeks, what with my feet that mysteriously seized up at the beginning of the year. The light wasn't good, so the pics tended to be a bit blurry:

And one from my landlady's garden:

All taken with a humble cell phone camera.

 

[john]

Love the photos Brian. Art is supposed to be pretentious. I like the first and third ones best. The reflection of the tree branches in the water is very cool. It brings one from the macro to the landscape. The two perspectives make it interesting.

Good video about art being pretentious. But she speaks kind of fast and with so many good points that my brain has a hard time keeping up. One can actually slow the playback in settings.

 

[Enyaw]

You do take good photos.
.

 

[john]

Along with art I also find astronomy interesting. The art of nature. This is an image of the Flaming Star Nebula. This nebula contains gasses and dust that are both reflective and also emit light due to excitation from the local stars. Sort of like a neon sign. It is within our Milky Way galaxy and is about five light years in size and is about 1500 light years away. So this actually an image of it that is 1500 years old. The stars were created from the cloud of gasses and dust. The created illuminates it's creator.

This image - taken with a tracking telescope- is composed of about three hours of one minute exposures that are stacked. Using software the many stars that are between this and us have been removed to better show the nebula. Otherwise this would be peppered with stars. I've just left the two that are part of the nebula. I cropped and rotated the photo for better artistic presentation.

I've been doing this for about twenty years and I'm finally recently getting some good photos.

 

[brianvds]

Along with art I also find astronomy interesting. The art of nature. This is an image of the Flaming Star Nebula. This nebula contains gasses and dust that are both reflective and also emit light due to excitation from the local stars. Sort of like a neon sign. It is within our Milky Way galaxy and is about five light years in size and is about 1500 light years away. So this actually an image of it that is 1500 years old. The stars were created from the cloud of gasses and dust. The created illuminates it's creator.

This image - taken with a tracking telescope- is composed of about three hours of one minute exposures that are stacked. Using software the many stars that are between this and us have been removed to better show the nebula. Otherwise this would be peppered with stars. I've just left the two that are part of the nebula. I cropped and rotated the photo for better artistic presentation.

I've been doing this for about twenty years and I'm finally recently getting some good photos.

View attachment 38825

Great shot. It's remarkable how technology has progressed - nowadays amateur astronomers routinely take better pictures than the professionals could even just a few decades ago.

 

[Artyczar]

John, I am fascinated with astronomy myself. Love that this image is 1500 years old. It can only be since it was that far away. Such a mind trip! Love it.

 

[brianvds]

Early morning visitors - hadeda ibis and speckled mousebird:

 

[brianvds]

Only in Africa! A still from a video I saw online, of a whole herd of hippos calmly wandering around a parking area in the coastal tourist town of St Lucia:

My own nature walk was rather more modest....

 

[JennieJo]

It

Snakes are common here, but very seldom seen. I can't remember when last I have seen one. Particularly this time of year: it's winter, so snakes are mostly still asleep. The mongooses eat mostly insects, and I would guess this is a rather difficult time of year for them, with not much prey available.

With a mongoose that tame, I'd be more worried about rabies, which they are known to sometimes carry. I see in Wikipedia that with some genetic types of yellow mongoose, they can carry it without showing symptoms for years. And thus, cute or not, it is best to keep one's distance.

@Artyczar mongoose and meerkats belong to the same family of critters, so they are fairly closely related. The yellow mongoose is in fact sometimes referred to as the "red meerkat" (their coat can vary from yellowish to reddish). So they do indeed resemble meerkats quite a bit.

We also have plenty of weaver birds here, and I noticed last week that the males are beginning to change into there yellow summer coats - a sign that spring is not far off!

View attachment 32864

Its always nice to find previously unseen threads. Snakes, we have a few. But ... not too few to mention.

One is a carpet snake that is our mouse controller. Found his latest 'shed' a few days ago. Hanging from a verandah rafter.

 

[OliveOyl]

I would LOVE to see some hippos meandering through the streets or out in the wild! But no...I don't want to see a snake, and haven't so far, although there are plenty around here. I do tend to keep my eyes as much on the ground as I do looking up and around. But instead of showing you all MY colorful and dramatic flora and fauna (as if), how about I show you something BROWN...for a change?

So...there are a couple of canyons with petroglyphs, a few minutes from our house and I love walking around inside any of them. When you start off, you usually see the rooflines of houses or hear traffic noise. Can you see the little person walking on top of the escarpment below? Behind them is Sandia Peak and off to the right is the rest of the city (Albuquerque) where most of the scary riffraff live who run over pedestrians and shoot guns and steal cars.

Earlier this week (and today), it was about 68 degrees...not bad for February! So we took a canyon walk at the PIEDRAS MARCARDAS ("marked rock"). The roped-off trail is just under 2 miles so, easy and breezy. Way off in the distance are the backsides of the Three Sisters Volcanoes, or as I like to call them...the sisters asses. My house is over there.

Once you start walking, it gets peaceful and serene and you can easily forget about the surrounding "modern" civilization. I always feel I should whisper. You might pass another hiker, or spot a skittering lizard, and you can hear (but not see because they're hidden) all sorts of bird noises that seem to be magnified by the encircling "canyon bowl." And that's about as exciting as it gets, which suits me fine.

You can't go beyond the rope barrier so only about 400 petroglyphs are visible. I think there's about 5000 scattered around in this one particular canyon but remain hidden from the trail. The rocks are black because of the "desert varnish" (thin coating of clay and iron/manganese oxides) which were created by lava flows (from the hot sisters!!) over 200,000 years ago. Native Americans, and later Spanish settlers, chipped away with stone tools to reveal the lighter rock underneath the varnish. Nobody really knows what the symbols mean or why it was done, but maybe this is their own version of...ancient graffiti. Just leaving their art mark on the world.

 

[Terri]

I love these shots, Olive! I happen to think petroglyphs are magical - what else can so rawly display a connection between present day people and these ancestral native Americans? Love seeing them. Your whole area looks peaceful, beautiful, and timeless.

Brian: I'd love to see those strolling hippos - I think! Gotta wonder what would happen if you needed to back out your car, and they weren't ready to move out of the way.

Jennie: - that's an impressive snakeskin you have there! Holy crap!