Zooming – September 2016

I already did a zooming post earlier this month focused totally on insects --- but there have been so many other good shots that I couldn’t resist another for this month with more than insects in the mix. I am getting a new camera soon so this might be the last set of images with the 30x in optics and digital up to 120x. Let’s start with some plants: crabapples against a clear blue sky. Most of the leaves have already fallen from the tree but I looked around to find some fruit with a leaf nearby.

A flower with its petals still in tubes. Soon they would flatten into more normal looking petals.

A cloud of pink flowers.

Lots of pollen.

Milkweed seeds on the verge of blowing away.

The long central stalk of the hibiscus flower.

And a mushroom that was greenish underneath.

Back to some animals…..this chipmunk had very full cheek pouches. It was probably collecting food to be stored away for winter.

A skipper sunning itself among the dew drops on a large flower.

A bee so focused on the flower that it doesn’t notice my son-in-law’s camera trying to get a close shot (upper left corner). I prefer using the zoom!

A molting bird…maybe a grackle?

A dragonfly.

Zooming – May 2016

The zoomed images are more familiar things list month. See how many of them you recognize (click on the image to see an enlarged version of the collage).

Grackle and chives bud

Horse chestnut and paulownia (princess tree) flowers

Sweet bay bud, chives (further along their bloom cycle than the first image), tulip poplar flowers

Toad, lacewing, grass with heavy dew

Mourning doves, strawberries, iris flower

Birds at Belmont with Pre-schoolers

Last week I spent a day volunteering at Belmont for a pre-school field trip. I led an activity about birds – with the children sitting on a blanket and looking out over the meadow. There were 5 groups in all: 3 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon. We talked about birds using pictures of birds on a felt board and feathers (I whooshed a turkey feather through the air and they were surprised at the noise it made!) – but the real show was behind me at the bird feeders and the meadow and a high snag in a tree a little further away.

At the feeders: one group saw a nuthatch, several groups saw the grackle,

And all of them saw red-winged blackbirds.

There were some ‘mystery’ birds at the feeder as well and birds we could hear but not see. But that just made it fun to listen and see how many birds we could hear.

In the meadow, the mourning doves looked for food among the grasses dried from last year and the newly emerging plants. The red tailed hawk was in a high snag across the meadow for all the morning sessions! The afternoon sessions got a fleeting look at the red trailed hawk flying across the meadow and into the woods where we were hiking.

Toward the end of each session we listened to recorded birds sounds. The preschoolers were very tickled to discover that the recorded sound for ‘red-winged blackbird’ matched what they had been hearing all morning!