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I had had such a good
time out at the farm on the 10th that when I got a free morning
two weeks later I decided to head back there. When I arrived and
stopped by the trailer that my friend Oliver uses as an office,
I found that Oli wasn't there. However, his friend Joe was waiting
for him, and so I decided to be sociable and talked with Joe for
a while. Joe is a real likable guy, and I couldn't resist petting
him and scratching him behind the ears a little, too.
Then I put my wide-angle
lens on, and took a few photos of him. Handsome fellow, don't
you think?
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| Behind Joe's
porch is a cattle shed, and when I turned around, this lady was
checking me out. The wide-angle made her look pretty long. |
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| Up above,
I noticed some motion, and found a Brewer's Blackbird up on a power
line. This called for the telephoto, which I duly reattached. |
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| I decided
not to waste good sunlight, so I walked around and went through
the middle of the shed. It was about 8:45 or so, which I gathered
was breakfast time. |
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| Just past
the end of the shed, there was a pump of some sort. I liked the
object but not the photo, so I played with the photo in Photoshop
quite a bit. |
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Honestly, I still don't
like the photo, but I figured I'd show it anyway. Sometimes you
just can't rescue a photo, even with all sorts of high-tech tools.
I walked down a short
dirt road from the shed to the fields. There was a big pile on
the left of the road.
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It looked like they
were planning on having a really big campfire that night.
On my right, there
was a bunch of farm machinery sitting in a grass lot and I went
over and took a few photos of it. Here's the only shot of the
bunch that I liked, the disks on a harrow.
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| I continued
down the dirt road to the far field, and started walking its edge.
I encountered very few birds, and soon turned my attention to some
insects. The first one that posed for me was this Common Whitetail. |
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| Seeing some
orange color fluttering by, I chased it. Every now and then, it
would pause for a few moments in the grass. After several near-misses,
I finally got close enough at the right angle to get some photos,
although the best view I got still had an intervening blade of grass.
It turns out that my quarry was a Red Admiral. I like Red Admirals,
but don't often see them...more often I see the related Lorquin's
Admiral, which looks roughly like what you would get if you exchange
the orange and the white on this fellow. |
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| I kept walking
around the field, and around 9:30 I spotted a few really big birds
circling high up in the air currents. I watched them through my
binoculars for a while, and noticed the telltale dark-in-front-and-light-behind
wings of the Turkey Vulture. Eventually they came down a little
and got closer, so I was able to get a few shots at moderate distance. |
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| At this
point I turned around and headed back towards the road and the farm
buildings. But I soon noticed the following, in the woods bordering
the field. |
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As you can clearly
see, that's a Brown Creeper. (He's on the left trunk in the middle
of the photo.) That's about what they look like in most situations
in real life...they're hard little guys to spot.
I hung around as he
hopped up the tree, and caught a shot of him in more light. After
a little contrast enhancement in Photoshop, you should be able
to see him better now.
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| I had seen
a few Empidonzx flycatchers on my way out, but hadn't gotten
a decent shot of any of them. Then I saw this one on the way back.
He's almost certainly a Willow Flycatcher; Oliver later said that
Willows were the only flycatchers he'd seen out there recently. |
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| Back by
the end of the dirt road, I paused to put my wide-angle lens on,
and then took a few landscapes. Here's the view across the far field;
it looks like corn to me. |
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| And here's
the view back towards the farm buildings, with the cow shed in the
center in front of the silos, and the machinery on the left of the
road. |
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| As I got
near the machinery, I changed lenses again, this time to my "normal",
general-purpose one. This lens was more suited to getting photos
of the machinery than the telephoto, and I took several shots of
several different subjects. Here's my favorite, which shows the
pickup at the front of what I think is a baler. The small silver
tines are for picking the hay up out of the field, and, if I understand
things correctly, the large yellow ones turn the hay so that it's
all pointed in the same direction. |
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| Back at
the cow shed, I used the general-purpose lens to get some cow shots.
This particular shed holds one- to two-year olds, a charming bunch.
Here's one of the friendly ladies. |
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And another follows.
This one looks a little besieged; there are a number of spots
where she's lost her hair and her skin shows through.
I didn't know what
the cause was, but Oli told me that it's a pox that the cows get.
It's relatively harmless, but farmers want the cows to be exposed
to it early in life, just like humans with measles or mumps. So
this girl will be fine.
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| Back at
the trailer, I found that Oli and a few other researchers had arrived.
Oli took some time out to show me around. We first went over to
check out a treatment pond; on the way, we passed a couple of researchers
who were netting some birds. Here they are working on disentangling
a House Sparrow that they caught in the net. It may look like she's
choking the poor thing but actually, she's not. |
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| Oli showed
me a Tree Swallow nest in a nestbox; the little swallows had already
fledged, but there was one that didn't make it. Here's the poor
little guy. |
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| We didn't
find much but Mallards at the treatment pond, and Oli had a bunch
of work to do, so after a little more chatting we parted ways and
I headed back towards my car. On the way, though, I encountered
another one of the farm residents, a scruffy-lookin' Shetland sheepdog
named Robbie. According to Oli, Robbie chases birds from dawn to
dusk, but never catches them. |
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That's a dog after
my own heart...I feel a bond forming between him and me already.
And when I got to my
car, I noticed one of the other farm cats on the lawn nearby.
Oli had told me that there was a Siamese around, but I was the
first that I saw of him. His name is Blue-eyes.
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| As I was
putting my camera equipment in my trunk, I saw a dragonfly come
in and land near my car: it was a Cherry-faced Meadowhawk. The telephoto
did an okay but not great job on him, and he was long gone by the
time I got a shorter lens on. |
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It was now nearing
1:00 in the afternoon, and I had a meeting to be at, so I finished
packing in the camera and headed on to work.
Hangin' with Holsteins,
Tom
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