You would not believe your eyes

I was looking at some photos that were taken with Kev's game camera... look at the eyelashes on this doe...


Seriously... look...


and... EARS!



EARS!!



Privacy patch required...



Deer porn *sigh*... and deer kisses on a cold morning...



Bye-bye...

You can run...

Awesome, eh?! This photo of a hawk was the only photo that turned out at all of the 8 taken on Kev's game camera. But what a shot. Kev set up his game camera overlooking a deer carcass, which I cleverly eliminated from the above photo... well, perhaps not so cleverly because that's why the picture looks a little choppy under the bird's belly and left wing (his left, not yours). We were surprised to get only 8 shots, and the other 7 turned out with 1 white with just the photo label at bottom with the other 6 just blanks. Total blanks. We don't know yet if there is something wrong with the camera or what. Here's hoping not.

If you wanna see the original pic in all its carcass glory, click on the one below to enlarge. It's kinda yukky, though. So you've been warned...

Goose egg

I mentioned recently that I found a goose egg on the side of our pond, and that Kev set up his game camera to monitor the situation. Good thing we weren't on pins and needles waiting for something exciting...

The most exciting part (not) was convincing Reilly, our dog, that it wasn't a ball... over and over and over and over...



The pair of Canada geese would visit the egg daily. They'd fly in and spend some time around the egg.





I watched them do this a few different times, and I never saw them actually touch the egg. They'd land on the pond and then swim over to, or near, the egg. Watching the pair fly in, swoop low, swing around and majestically land on the pond was awesome. When I saw them, they would then swim directly to the egg, except for one time when they swam toward it, then passed it, then back to it.

I believe they probably did this more than once per day, visiting their egg. I also believe they have a nest nearby. We hear them often, late at night or early in the mornings. It has been a puzzle to me... it had to be a mistake when she laid the egg there, like, oops, that one popped out by accident! (Maybe she bent over when she shouldn't have, like after having chili for lunch.)

But why the visits?

Anyway, the visits are over now. We finally retrieved the egg, and Sam, very interested, cracked it open last night, well away from the house. He said it didn't stink and it looked just like a regular egg, no big red spots or anything. I was tired of making sure the dogs didn't get to it, and with the days warming up, I'm pretty sure it'd be one stinky egg soon. I'm kinda surprised a crow or something didn't go for it.

Kev's game camera caught very few photos in the past 3 weeks. We're not sure why; we know there were times when the geese were definitely there at the egg, but the game camera took no photos. Maybe the lighting at the time wasn't enough, or maybe there was too much sunshine, to trigger the camera's action sensor. We got about 15 photos; half were of nothing.

A couple of the pics were kinda neat, though...

Why, hello there

Every once in a while, I like to look through Photo Friday. I like the Link Viewer they have, and I like zipping through the photos. I do this sometimes at work at my desk while I spend a quick 15 minutes eating my lunch, and it's a nice little break in the middle of a busy day. Especially when some of the photos are so spectacular, they can take one right out of one's dinky little cubicle for a brief second or two. Nice.

The range of photo quality, though, is truly amazing... from really great to really bad. A few years back, I used to participate, mostly as a means to try to learn how to use an Olympus that was my first real digital camera (I'm not counting my very old Sony Mavica). That Olympus had features on it that I never did get around to using. I think Photo Friday was booming then, this was early 2005... and it wasn't unusual to see over 600 photos posted for one weekly challenge. That's a lot of photos to look at, especially when we had only dial-up Internet access back then. I think now it mostly depends on the weekly challenge, some of them get a lot of interest, thus 900 photos, and some don't, so 120 photos. I find it all very interesting.

Mostly I enjoy Photo Friday just to find those few photos that really strike me for whatever reason. A photo I can't get out of my mind.

There's a lot of professionals or almost-professionals using it for basically free advertising, and eh, who cares. But they bore me. They bore me about as much as their polar opposites... the ones I see that are the half-assed photos of someone's little daughter, photos hardly in focus and barely able to be categorized as part of the week's challenge. Those all just make me bored. I mean, HELLO, it's Photo Friday, not show me your crappy quality photo you took AGAIN of your kid. And it's not all about you, Mr. $8,000-camera PLUS expensive lens selling photos and copyrighting everything because of money, money, money.

Photo Friday is about... well, here it is in their own words:

• Each week Photo Friday posts a photo assignment. Your mission is the creative interpretation of the week's theme. When you're done, post the picture you took to your website and submit your link to Photo Friday.


• Photo Friday is about challenging our participants to be original and creative within the constraints of the week's theme. It's not a competition. Anyone with a camera and a place on the internet to post pictures can participate.

I like the regular average Joes & Janes who take a great shot or set up a great shot for the challenge and post it. Those are the pics I look for.

Last week's challenge was "Extreme Closeup" and some of the photos were amazing. This one I just cannot get out of my head. I just like this little feller. He's my laptop's desktop background right now. Yes, I totally do that. If I find a photo I adore, I may use it for my desktop background. I mean, seriously, click on the photo and look at him large... how can you say no to those eyes?

I found one photo quite some time ago that was a black and white shot of a circle of dark stones on a beach, and there was just something about it that was awesome. But I can't locate it now, and so... I miss it. But not enough to go through a kazillion Photo Friday photos to try and find it.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

OK, so... reminding myself of my penchant for copying the pics for using as my desktop background, I went to my old computer and found it!...



I sorely wish I could give credit to the photographer, but after finding the file and looking at the date of it, then spending a bit of time trying to find it again on Photo Friday, well... it seems an impossible task. If I find the photographer, I will totally update this post and give him credit (I seem to recall it was a him, and they were on vacation in Norway or Finland or something, and he lived in Switzerland or something, or I could possibly have dreamt all that up). Love the photo, though. Don't you? Do a Google image search on "beach circle" and you'll see some neat photos, but in my opinion, not as good as this one.

   UPDATE:
   I found the pic, "on the beach" on Photo Friday,
   in the "Best of 2007"... here's the link to it
   on the beach by urbanmonster
   Not the story I remember...
   But awesome photo.

This has been such a strange day. Good Friday, and a holiday by my company (whoo-hoo, thank God for those Christians, eh). But I did have to do a bit of work today, at least from home (been doing a LOT of that lately). Kev spent time outside stacking wood, and he came in the house to tell me there was a beautiful pair of Canada geese setting on the edge of our pond in the sun. So I grabbed Joycie's/my little Sony and snuck out there. It was pretty windy today, so I managed to get quite close to them.


Since I knew Kev was going to head out back with the 3 dogs shortly and would scare the pair away, I tried to get even closer. They got up and got agitated, and then got into the pond, like swimming kind of toward me. I taped it with the little Sony, but between my walking on uneven ground, the strong wind, my facing the sun, and the little Sony wiggling at every move, the movie file is awful (Joycie said like "The Blair Witch Project"... ugh!). I would walk a little closer toward them then stop, then walk, then stop... and at one point they really started squawking at me. Something caught my eye and I looked down at the edge of the pond and saw this:


Why would she lay an egg on the edge of the pond like that? Freaked me out. I stopped the taping, and right about then, the 2 geese took off from the pond... talk about a grand exit. It was gorgeous. And I wasn't recording any longer. Sweet.

So Kev and I, and the 3 dogs, took another 4-wheeler ride out back and retrieved the game camera. I convinced Kev to plant a fence post near the egg and set up the camera there... I wanna see what happens to it. When Kev was setting the metal fence post, Barney and Reilly were with us, getting into the pond. Reilly suddenly noticed the egg and started for it... Kev had to yell at him quick. Reilly thought it was a ball, and he surely had to get it before Barney! That would've been a let-down in so many ways.

Can't wait to see what the camera shows tomorrow. Full moon tonight, too. Very beautiful on the pond. And how do I know this? Because it is right now almost one o'clock a.m., A.M.! I am wide awake at 1am. This is not like me, and I'm not sure how this happened. I am the one trying to stay up until at least 8:30pm lately. Especially now, working so many extra hours on quarter close (work stuff, y'know). I'm pooped by 7pm. But today, I'm all wide awake. Well, wide awake for me. Tomorrow should be very interesting.

i like big bucks

Seeing the photos of the eagle from Kev's game camera reminded us of these photos from the end of October and beginning of November, this past hunting season. Kev had set up his game camera over on Mom & Dad's West 20 for a few days.

There was a nice scrape which happened to be right on one of the trails. But the deer over there are so used to the golf cart and 4-wheelers, so that activity doesn't seem to bother them at all. Kev set up the game camera at the scrape on the trail. Say hi to the camera, Mom, Dad & Toby!



Say hi to the camera, Kathy & Bob!



That photo is kinda cool... like a negative. During dusk, the camera can't make up its mind to take a color photo or a black and white night shot, so we get these eerie ghostly shots.

When we went through these photos the first time, Kev got, quite understandably, very excited. For our area, these are some very big antlers...





Kev was also excited about the number of different bucks whose photos were captured, from little ones to the big guy.









All of them very interested in the branch above, which had clearly been rubbed often.



We also had a lot of photos of doe, who were also interested in that branch. But the bucks were interested in them! And showing it...



Because, it's really, well and truly, all about the doe...



And can you blame them...



All together now... awww!!!...

the eagle has landed

Kev has his game camera set up again on another carcass, and this time... a young eagle appeared...







That was awesome seeing this guy. Kev kept saying, "look at those talons" and making me zoom in on the eagle's feet. Wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of those, that's for sure. I have never seen an eagle anywhere near where we live. Kev believes he has seen this guy near our pond once before. Kev has seen some eagle nests not too far from our place, when he was out on state-owned land bow hunting this past October, but he didn't see any activity around them, no birds.

Kev brought in the photo chip to me and then went back outside to finish up some jobs. I stepped out on the porch to pet old, blind Barney and I hollered out to Kev that he was going to see a photo of something never before photographed by anyone in our family. While Kev finished cleaning out the dog run, he kept trying to speculate as to what critter it was; he never did guess an eagle, and he was thrilled to see these photos. Very cool.

Two by two on the carcass

We've gotten some more interesting photos from the game camera Kev set up on the deer carcasses out back.

This photo surprised us... we were like, whoa, what's that?...



Two hawks! Awesome.



Then it seemed like everything started to appear in pairs, like these crows again...



And these raccoons...



So we were hoping for it... and yes! a pair of coyotes...



That is the only photo we have out of a few hundred that shows 2 coyotes; all other coyote photos show only 1 of them. So... there is more than one out there. I mean, you have to figure where there is one coyote, there's another... I read recently that they usually hunt in pairs. We hear them frequently, and there sure are a lot more than a couple of them out there calling to each other, howling and yipping.

It was also pretty cool that we finally got a non-blurry shot of a coyote's face and head. Not that you can see it in any great detail, but you can see the face...

Mmm... yummy carcass..

A while ago, Kev brought in the game camera because where he had it set up near his automatic feeder, we were getting a lot of photos, but they were pretty much all the same after a while... deer eating. We see that every day out our windows, so it began to be not so interesting. Once you’ve seen a couple hundred night shots of the same group of deer eating, well... you’ve seen ‘em all.

So about that time, he dragged 3 frozen deer carcasses way out back. There was no activity around them for a few days. When Kev finally saw tracks, he set up the game camera. We anticipated some great shots, hopefully something we hadn’t yet caught with that Moultrie camera.

Kev checked the Moultrie camera one day last week, and he saw there was close to a hundred photos on it. So he grabbed the card, and we had us a look...

The Red-Tailed Hawk was back, often. Several photos of him. Look at the talons on him.



Seriously, look at those talons!



What a gorgeous bird.



I love this shot with his wings out...



And he has to be huge... look at him in comparison to the carcass. And notice where the carcass is... this was taken, as you can see, at close to 10am on Saturday, February 9th...



This was the very next photo on the card, taken close to 2pm the next day, Sunday... notice where the carcass is now... and whatever moved it wasn’t caught by the camera...



Until later, that is… finally! A photo of the elusive coyote... We have some really cool photos, though none of them show his head and face clearly.



Here he’s digging for the 3rd carcass that Kev put below the 2 on top...



Lots of photos of his backside, while he’s filling his belly, which is probably making him happy, but more likely wishing it was a nice, warm kill... notice the temperature... brrr...



This is what all the face shots are like… I think of all the creatures we’ve caught with this game camera, this coyote seems to be the most aware and leery of it...



Now this photo is later that same day, late Sunday evening, and notice the temperature now. It was so cold that day... wind chills of something like -20 degrees F., and the Moultrie clearly had some trouble handling it. Kev said the clock is off now, too, by about 20 minutes or so. We’re lucky it kept photographing.



Still digging at that 3rd carcass...



Nice photo of the bottom of his back left paw...



We really enjoyed all the photos of the coyote. I guess I was expecting more than 1 if we ever got coyote with the Moultrie. Kev said, though, that he’s seen just 1 on occasion during the past couple of years. I thought coyotes always ran in packs. Makes me wonder why this one is alone.

The hawk wasn’t the only bird caught by the Moultrie, and I was very happy to see this crow. I only wish it were better focused. Very cool profile, though.



And there were many shots of blue jays... I didn’t realize the jays would pick at the carcass... but then, all the birds seems to love the suet balls I buy at the local butcher shop, and those are made with various farm animal fats, like cattle and hogs. Do you see his little friend in this photo?



We had 2 photos of the hawk leaving... beautiful...



Bye!