The slideshow for this month includes some pictures I took at the Rio Grande Birding Festival in November but didn’t get posted about until this month. There are a few pictures from my visit to Dallas and the holiday lights too. Enjoy the slideshow!
I forced myself to pick 2 pictures from each month to feature in this post. They were taken in my yard, at the Springfield Botanical Garden (and the butterfly house and Japanese Stroll Garden there), my daughter’s yard and during my travels for prairie walks in SW Missouri, to Loess Bluffs National Wildlife Refuge in NW Missouri, Chicago IL, Branson, and the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas. They are all taken outdoors! Enjoy the slideshow.
On the last evening of the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival, we drove ourselves to the South Padre Island mudflat where we met our tour group for photographing the sunset. We drove out onto the mudflat – trying to avoid puddles.
It was well before sunset, and I enjoyed the antics of a Reddish Egret in the late afternoon light. The bird seemed to be finding tidbits in the small pool. It was a windy afternoon which caused the head and neck feathers to move about.
I was using my bridge camera (Canon Powershot SX70 HS) on a monopod (so I only had one thing to clean mud/sand from at the end of the evening). I kept trying to get a bird in flight flying across the sun…failed, but it was still fun trying. I always like to see the color change and the sun gets lower. The mosaic below is in the order the images were taken; click on any of them to see a larger version.
I made a movie of the actual setting of the sun!
We headed back to our hotel afterward…wanting an early evening since we had a last early morning field trip before we started home the next day.
A lot happened in November…a birding festival and my first visit to my dad’s new memory care place…and then Thanksgiving…so many little celebrations! Here are my top ten for the month:
Laguna Seca. My husband insisted on a photography-oriented field trip and I acquiesced. It was great. I celebrated seeing a coachwhip snake….and lots of cardinals…at close range with great background.
Trekking poles. Hurray for trekking poles! They help me avoid back pain while I am hiking.
Chachalaca. I celebrated seeing the pink neck/check pouch come/go in the one video I took of chachalaca drinking from a water puddle…and listening to the flock for warnings.
Sunset on the mudflat. The last evening of the birding festival we were on a South Padre Island mudflat photographing the sunset. It was a great way to celebrate the winding down of the festival. I will post about it soon.
Bobwhites. We had been expecting to see bobwhites on several of our field trips in the Rio Grande Valley….celebrated when we finally saw them when we were on the last field trip!
Dark chocolate. I am celebrating the season with specialty dark chocolate first thing in the morning!
Aurora. I celebrated my small collection of pictures of the Aurora as seen from the Springfield MO area.
Cooking a big pumpkin. There was one pumpkin left from son-in-law’s pumpkin carving event and I celebrated it multiple times: that the flat side made it an easy fit in my oven to cook whole, that the seeds were large (great for roasting and then used to top salad and soups), and that there was a lot of pulp and I made custard, a cake and a frittata!
Seeing a great blue heron from my hotel window. I celebrated seeing a great blue heron on the pond below my hotel room window when I first opened the drapes on my second day in Dallas. What a great way to start the day!
Thanksgiving at memory care. The memory care facility held a special meal for the residents the Friday before Thanksgiving. My sister and I enjoyed it with my father. He cleaned his plate and enjoyed the live music. It was wonderful to celebrate with him.
My second stop on my way to the Missouri Department of Conservation Partners Roundtable was at the Runge Conservation Nature Center in Jefferson City. They had a great display of fall squashes near their entrance!
I chose to hike first…before I went into the building. I noticed a fall dogwood, milkweed pods with milkweed bugs, the path lined with trees (many redcedars), a stump with well-defined rings, and a honey locust (big thorns all along the trunk).
Best of all were two turkeys that crossed the path and didn’t run away as I got closer. They must be accustomed to people being around.
Inside the building there was a display of painted rocks that I enjoyed.
Several quilts were hanging and one featured butterflies and moths. I chose the depiction of the Luna Moth to include in this post.
I bought a puzzle for my dad and a Missouri wildflower book for myself from the gift shop.
I headed to the hotel and enjoyed a quite evening getting prepared for the conference.
The sunset from the hotel window was a good view for the end of the day.
My husband got the announcement about field trips from the local Audubon chapter and suggested the day trip to the Lockwood area to (hopefully) see Northern Harriers and Short-eared Owls. The group met in a parking lot before setting out as a caravan of cars; walkie-talkies were handed out to enable communication along the way.
We were surprised that most of the field trip was spent in the car – driving around on country roads with small farms (lots of cattle) with occasional prairies managed by the Missouri Prairie Foundation or the Missouri Department of Conservation. We did see lots of Northern Harriers and Red-tailed Hawks and Kestrels and Shrikes and a flock of red-winged blackbirds (maybe with some other kinds of blackbirds mixed in) large enough to fly up into a murmuration. No short-eared owls though. We did see a Prairie Falcon!
I didn’t take any pictures as we drove around although in retrospect maybe I should have leaned out the window with my camera.
We stopped for lunch at Cooky’s Café in Golden City, MO for lunch – the leaders of the trip having called ahead to let them know the number of people and the approximate time we’d arrive. It worked out well. The food was good and there was a great selection of pies for dessert.
We stopped late in the afternoon at Niawathe Prairie Conservation Area and walked to the top of a low hill to look for owls. They had been spotted there recently. I took some pictures of the winter prairie from the top.
There were occasional holes (armadillo probably) big enough to be dangerous to anyone walking the prairie in the dark so we went back to the cars to try one more place as the sky became colorful.
We drove past another prairie where short-eared owls had been seen recently. No luck.
I contented myself with two sunset pictures as we headed back to Lockwood…and then home.
The area has a fair number of wind turbines. We noted them early in the field trip and as we drove around….and then we got to see the red lights that flash in unison at night!
This was our first field trip with the local Audubon chapter and we’ll be doing more. I need to think about how to do more photography. There were several people that were using a better bridge camera than my current Canon Powershot SX70 HS…and my husband opted to order one for me. Good birds and good tip on a new camera…a well spent Saturday.
January was a busy month but not one that included any big photography opportunities! My selections for zoomed images this month have some themes: sunrise/sunset, snow, birds, and lights. They are mostly from Missouri (although there are two that are left over from my trip to New Mexico in December that I didn’t post about until January). Enjoy the photographic mosaic.
My husband, daughter, and I took the seasonal Top of the Rock’s Nature at Night tour last week. It’s a 2.5-mile trail via plastic enclosed golf cart through light displays, waterfalls, bridge crossings, a cave, and classic holiday scenes.
On the drive south from our home in Nixa MO, the sun was going down. I tried a few sunset pictures. There were enough clouds to provide some added structure.
The first lights we saw were before the gate to the property…2 bison. The car was moving as I took the picture, which made their hides look furrier!
The first lights we saw were before the gate to the property…2 bison. The car was moving as I took the picture, which made their hides look furrier!
We had bought our tickets ahead of time, so I took a few minutes to take pictures of the lights below, the sunset, and the lake before we got in the line for the golf carts.
The temperature was in the low 40s, but we were bundled up and the plastic cover helped too. My daughter did the driving. There were some sharp turns, inclines, and shallow water in some areas along the route. We stayed in the cart the whole time as instructed so all the pictures I took were through the plastic cover.
My favorite display included a waterfall with a giant wolf and orb in lights. I took the scene from several angles and magnifications.
The activity was the grand finale of our ‘holiday’ season!
This is the last post about our road trip to the2024 Festival of the Cranes in New Mexico in December! It is mainly about our trip home. My husband was driving again so I could take pictures!
We left after the morning with the falconer (peregrines and Harris’s Hawks) so the sun was almost overhead when we passed through Albuquerque NM. I hadn’t noticed the big pots between the two directions of the interstate when we can through in the other direction. I did remember the big aloe/yucca sculpture perched on a ledge above the highway – and was pleased that I managed to photograph it.
Santa Rosa NM was our stop again for the night and we left early the next morning for the long drive back to Missouri. We were near Tucumcari for the sunrise. The clouds and the vegetation along the highway made for a great photographic opportunity.
We were lucky that the clouds were thick when the sun popped above the horizon – no painfully bright sunshine in our eyes!
We saw the wind turbines in the panhandle of Texas again and a Route 66 mosaic in the rest stop bathroom.
Later in the day, there was Tulsa highway art.
We were glad to be home again but are still savoring our December time in New Mexico.
Previous Festival of the Cranes posts
The winter sunrise and sunset with sandhill cranes at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge are always good photography challenges. We had two sunset opportunities during our trip in early December for the Festival of the Cranes. The first day was cloudy but there was a ‘hole’ in the clouds at just the right time to light up a group of cranes. The problem was the cranes were grouped together…and chowing down rather than settling for the night. The birds were in one of the flooded ‘wet soil’ farming units that had plenty of small invertebrates and seeds in the shallow water for them to eat. The cranes were up and own…focused on feeding…and the stubble made for a messy water surface.
I didn’t ever find a solitary crane free of stubble. The image below was a closest as I got…but I still like the silhouette of the bird…balance on one leg…surrounded by the orange glint of sunset on the water.
The next opportunity was on a different pond, and we arrived well before sunset. I got a zoomed shot of a female Northern Shoveler than I liked…and turned around to get a picture of the moon. The idea was to use the color of sunset and then – perhaps – do some photography with the light of the moon.
The sun went down, and I realized that the water was shallow enough that the surface was not going to be a smooth in this location either.
I opted to try to photograph cranes as they flew in to roost…backlit by the waning sunset. I didn’t get good enough at it until the color was mostly gone. The moon was bright behind me.
The cranes were moving about their roost pond but not so intent on feeding as the previous day/location. My favorite picture was one of the last that I took….with two cranes moving through silver water.
Previous Festival of the Cranes posts
My monthly 2-day road trip to Texas to visit my dad was sunny and full of fall sights. The temperatures were decidedly cool. On the first day, I noticed more hawks that usual on high branches of roadside trees – particularly in Oklahoma. Some of them were probably red-tails but some were obviously smaller. Going 70 miles an hour, I only get a quick glimpse (avoiding becoming a distracted driver).
I stopped at the Texas welcome center on US 75 after leaving Oklahoma to eat my lunch and enjoyed their native plant garden. The Turk’s cap was still blooming.
The American beautyberry has clumps of purple drupes but some that were on the top part of the clump looked burnt. I wondered if they got the most summer sun…and were damaged by many days of the high temperatures.
There was a small tree that had a lots of red berries. I managed to ID it: possumhaw (Ilex decidua). It is a native deciduous holly. It grows in Missouri and I might plant one in my yard…maybe replacing a non-native.
It was very windy the next day on my drive back to Missouri. I didn’t see hawks perching….but did see some soaring. One was flying low over a field near the highway --- obviously hunting.
The sun was going down by the time I got back to Missouri. The light from the setting sun gave the roadside trees and orange glow. It was a good scenic finale for the road trip.
My daughter and I were traveling on July 4th. Our original plan had been to enjoy the fireworks in a park in Norman, Oklahoma but it started raining around 6 PM and it didn’t look like the rain would clear until much later; the program was going to be delayed, at least.
The radar indicated that it wasn’t raining in Oklahoma City so after dinner we headed into the city to see the Oklahoma City National Memorial at the site of 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building. The museum was closed…we went to see the grounds: the 168 empty chairs representing the people that perished (small chairs for the children), the reflecting pool, the gates of time (the peace before the blast at 9:01 and 9:03 the first second of recovery), the Survivor Tree (an American Elm), and tiles made by children…sent to Oklahoma City after the bombing. The sun was getting closer to the horizon and it began sprinkling as we were getting ready to leave. It was a poignant place…flags had been placed by each chair in celebration of the 4th of July.
As we drove back to Norman, there was harder rain, lots of lightning. We began to wonder if the lightning would cause the city to cancel the events that were planned in the park. It was very dramatic – cloud to ground and cloud to cloud. We were glad to get back to the hotel.
We enjoyed the lightning show from our hotel window. The rain tapered off, but the lightning continued…with almost no thunder. We started to see some fireworks – not professional shows but clearly people that had planned their own fireworks event. Looking at the map – we expected to see the fireworks in the park at some point but the time it was schedule came and went. Lightning was still lighting up the sky. We decided that the show must have been canceled. About 5 minutes later we heard a barrage of fireworks sounds…we looked out the window again and it was obviously the fireworks in the park – high, loud, a steady stream of bursts for at least 15 minutes! I took pictures through hotel window. Toward the end, it was obvious that there were a lot of smoke in the air from the fireworks…they began to look like science fiction images of explosions inside a nebula.
I’m seeing more stories about how environmentally unfriendly fireworks can be…impacting air quality and then the remnants of the explosions (some toxic) drifting down over a wide area. And many pets are panicked by the sounds of fireworks. Evidently some places are moving toward drone light shows rather than fireworks. Maybe I’ll find one of those shows next year. I appreciate the effort Norman, Oklahoma put in for their event this year…even though I ended up observing it from my hotel window!
Lots of birds in the Zooming slide show this month – from the Whooping Crane Festival in south Texas as well as Josey Ranch (Carrollton TX), the Springfield Botanical Gardens (Springfield MO) and Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge (near Sherman TX). I find myself picking images that show bird behavior rather than portraits.
There are spring flowers in this collection as well…more of those coming in April!
Enjoy the March 2024 slide show!
Our second day of the Whooping Crane Festival continued with another boat tour after returning from the King Ranch and a quick lunch. The afternoon emphasis was on bird photography. The difference was subtle. The guide did suggest some settings to accommodate photographing in the very bright environment of a sunny day. I opted to take the normal opportunities to photograph birds as usual…but then took some photographic challenges too.
I started before we even boarded the boat. Grackles were taking snack packaging out of a trash can. The female seemed to be unimpressed with her partner’s antics.
I attempted to get a double-crested cormorant taking off from the water…managed to capture the form and splashes of water but the eye doesn’t show….plenty of room for improvement.
There were terns (probably common terns) diving toward the water for fish. I tried pointing my camera in that direction and pressing the button to take multiple pictures in fast succession. It was hard to hold the camera still as the boat moved! The shape of the bird as it nears the surface of the water was something I couldn’t study until I looked at my pictures on a bigger screen. This was my first attempt at photographing feeding terns!
The back of a white-tailed hawk – the only sighting of this species of the trip. It isn’t a great picture in the traditional sense….but it does tell a story. The bird was sitting in dead mangroves; the mangroves died during very cold weather a few years ago and recovery is slow; hurricane damage to the Aransas area would be even worse than before if one comes through before the mangroves can become established again.
The birds always seemed to be a little further away than optimal…and the boat was rocking. But I took pictures anyway: white ibis, little blue heron, osprey, great egret, and great blue heron. I tend to take photographs rather than make notes about what I am seeing…it’s easier with the camera already in hand!
And then there were the reddish egrets… with their pink and black bill.
And finally one started foraging…moving rapidly in the shallows. It seemed to veer off suddenly…something there that the bird didn’t expect?
I took group pictures of birds on small islands in the water…always interesting to see how many I can identify on my big screen later. In the one below, I see brown pelicans (adult and juvenile), American white pelicans, cormorants (double crested probably)…all in the foreground.
As I zoomed in on birds that were not in a group I noticed a black skimmer and some Caspian terns.
It’s always a thrill to see a bird I would not have seen without being on a birding field trip like this red-breast merganser. It was a single bird…swimming rapidly away from the boat…and I probably would not have noticed it without someone pointing it out. I’m not sure it was the guide or another participant that noticed it.
The same was true for another black-crowned night heron. I photographed one on the King Ranch in the morning! I was pleased that I was able to find and focus on the bird more easily than many of the others on the boat.
The light began to change as we neared the end of the day. There were enough clouds to try a non-bird landscape shot of the water the sky…a bit of land at the horizon.
I changed a setting on my camera to try an artsy image of a cormorant and the shore as we came back toward the dock.
And then the boat stopped just before we got to the dock….for dolphins. I couldn’t top my husband’s dolphin picture in the bow wave of the big ship, but it was fun trying to anticipate when they would surface!
And then one last picture before we got off the boat! It was a great second day at the Whooping Crane Festival. The next morning was an early one….getting on a boat at 6 AM to see Whooping Cranes in the Aransas National Wild Life Refuge. We headed to the hotel for an early evening to be ready for it.
The second activity of the Whooping Crane Festival for us was a Sunset Dolphin Cruise…in the late afternoon of the first day of the festival.
The angle of the sun made the water look bluer that it did earlier in the afternoon. There were plenty of brown pelicans about.
The moon was visible in the clear sky…above shoreline construction cranes.
Cormorants were using structures further above the water than earlier in the day.
I took several pictures of the Aransas Pass Lydia Ann Lighthouse as we passed by.
The high point of the trip was dolphins surfing the bow wave of a big ship coming through the channel. My husband managed to get a picture of three leaping out of the water!
By the end of the cruise the sun was sinking fast into the haze.
We headed to the hotel to rest up…be prepared for the early start of our second day at the Whooping Crane Festival.
My daughter attended the American Astronomical Society meeting in New Orleans last week with her research students. She sent a few pictures of the place that reminded me of the two visits I made to the city years ago…and something added to the skyline more recently.
She took a walking tour of the French Quarter…and took a picture on the river as it ended around sunset.
The next day she photographed the sunset from her hotel window. Her room was on an upper floor and the window was grubby…but it made the picture look ‘painterly.’
The second picture (only a minute later) highlighted a strange shape with a blue light on the horizon. It looked like a spy plane at first glance! I did some research. It is the Bollinger Canopy of Peace that spans across The National WWII Museum’s campus…built after 2015!
The next day my daughter and her students (and some others from the conference) did a late-in-the-day visit to the Audubon Aquarium in New Orleans. It was established in 1990 – long after my last visit to New Orleans for a Computer Measurement Group meeting in December 1981 (the first visit was in Fall 1977 for a King Tut exhibit).
It was fun to get her impressions of the city. A lot has changed in over 40 years, but the French Quarter is still the hub – hotels and museums and walking tours cluster around it. I also savored that both of us have the experience of traveling to interesting places as part of our careers.
The back of my parents’ house faces south. I’ve taken a few minutes to photograph the sky several times recently. I appreciate the trees close enough to make interesting horizons for sunrise and sunset pictures…sparse enough to show plenty of color.
The sunset was one that happened early in the month. My parents and watched it from the garden room…and I stepped outside to take a picture.
The next two were taken just after 8:30 in the morning….after a lot of the morning flights had taken off and the moon was still up.
I photographed a sunrise too. I used to try to hide the power lines but opted to feature them inn this image. There are still leaves on some of the trees (silhouettes); fall chores happen in December in this part of Texas!
The optics of my camera allow me to capture images that are better than I can see with my eyes – flowers, insects, birds, cave formations and seed pods that fill the frame…driftwood isolated from the noise of other things around it….sculpture, glass, and fall gourds specially arranged….sunrises and a sunset….the beauty of a fall morning. Every picture is a memory moment – a visual that also serves as a reminder of a place and mood and relationship with the people that experienced it with me. The places were mostly close to home in southwest Missouri (art museum, meadow, caverns) but also St. Louis and along the route between home and Carrollton TX.
Sequoya State Park (near Wagoner, Oklahoma) is about 3 hours from where we live. We opted for an overnight trip last week – staying at one of the duplex cabins in the park. It was a reconnoiter type of trip: how many birds would we see (and the vantage points to see them) and were the onsite cabins/amenities OK (and should we look at other state park destinations in the future). Our arrival was well before check-in time, so we walked down to Inspiration Point. I spotted a damselfly on the walkway almost immediately.
The big event of that walk was a kettle of American White pelicans over the lake. They were far enough away that the images were not very good – but it was fun to watch them swirl – noting how the light made them almost impossible to see for a few seconds; then they would turn and were easily seen.
The fall foliage was just beginning.
There was a rock ‘table’ with stones situated for seats under two trees!
We visited the nature center then drove to a parking area to hike the Fossil Trail that hugged the eastern side of the peninsula. We were rewarded by views of pelicans and cormorants (probably double crested) – still too distant for good images but I liked the color the light gave the water.
There was the usual shelf fungus, insects (katydid…and something that bit me), lichen, plants going to seed…all under a forest canopy with a little fall color.
We were out again at sunset near our cabin – overlooking the western side of the peninsula and the lake beyond. The sky was perfectly clear so there were no interesting reflections off clouds; I included silhouettes of trees instead! There were gulls coming to roost on the water as the sun went down.
Tomorrow the post will include sunrise at Sequoyah!
July has been hot…though not as hot as Texas. I’ve appreciated being home. The month started dry but then suddenly we got 2 inches of rain in 2 days after teasing with clouds and forecasts for rain that didn’t materialize. We have a good vantage point for the sunset over the neighborhood pool house from our patio.
I saw a large red-eared slider on the move across the neighbor’s yard behind our house; it appeared to be moving in the general direction of the ponds. By the time I got out of the house with my phone for the picture, the turtle was at the tennis court…and quickly discovered the fence barrier. I noticed that the back of the turtle appeared wet; I wondered if it (she?) had been laying eggs – maybe in some damp, mulchy place. I assume the turtle managed to get back to the pond; I didn’t stick around in the heat of midafternoon.
About a week later I walked out into the eastern side of our yard to photograph the sunrise from two perspectives over neighbors’ houses.
More recently I took a morning walk around the ponds. We have more Purple Loosestrife that ever this year at the edge of the ponds….which is not a good thing since the state says it is “a noxious weed in Missouri and should be removed as quickly as possible.” Maybe it takes some finesse to remove it with propagating it? I hope eventually we’ll eradicate it and plant something native – like buttonbush (one of my favorites).
Note that the second picture (above) is near the willow tree…the one that had grown around a stake. There seem to be more plants around the base of the willow this year than I noticed last year.
Asian honeysuckle – another non-native invasive plant – is also growing in clumps around the pond. I wonder if there are children that pull the flowers to taste the nectar? I remember doing that as a child…and taught my daughter to do it too!
There are maple seedlings that are growing in the areas that don’t get mowed and a small clover hill that is full of blooms even with the occasional mowing.
I tried an artsy picture of the sun glint on the water silhouetting the shore vegetation. It looks like a picture that could have been taken at night!
Bullfrogs are some of the more recognizable sounds at the pond. It is harder to see them. This one was under one of the loosestrifes. I heard another one not far away while I was photographing this one.
As I headed back to our gate, I saw a robin on our fence…observing me!
July is a great month to be outdoors in the morning…but the afternoons have been stifling – good time to be indoors with air conditioning.
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Celebrating the whole of life....
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