The 15th of July was a Saturday, and I was up and about a little earlier than normal, so on my way to Saturday brunch at the Golden Pita, I stopped at Piper Spit to see what was around. I started out with my macro lens on the camera, looking for good bugs and flowers at the little butterfly garden the parks folk maintain by the parking lot.

There weren't any butterflies about, but I did find a few bees. This one is a bumble bee known as a Mixed Bumble Bee, Bombus mixtus.

If you recognize him, give me a shout.

Nearby, I found this big ol' spider sunning himself on a leaf. He was missing one of his right legs, but he still moved fairly quickly and easily.

Now, I don't see spiders like this one that often, so I did some reading to try to identify him. One interesting thing about this spider is his wide cephalothorax (the part of the body where the legs attach); this turns out to indicate that he's a Crab Spider. Because his second set of legs is so long, we can further narrow him down to the Running Crab Spiders, most probably the common Philodromus praelustris.

Don't try that at home, folks. That posture was done by a professional goose under controlled conditions.

Walking a bit further out the spit, I spotted a family of Gadwalls out on the lake. Little Mallards are awful cute, but it's always special to see young ducks that aren't Mallards. There were five young Gadwalls in the family, and they were getting pretty big.

Out at the end of the wooden walkway, I saw a few Wood Ducks out by the lily pads. I didn't like how high above them I was, as it meant a very downward camera angle. To partially solve that problem, I rested the camera on the platform and laid down behind it so that I could look through the viewfinder. I was happy I did, because the Woodies were being pretty cute. Here are two shots of males.

I also took some shots of a female, but none of them turned out that well.

Walking back in towards land and lunch, I found an Eight-Spotted Skimmer perched on a plant beside the walkway, and took a few shots before moving on.

Lunch at the GP was scrumptuous and well-attended as always, and since it was nice outside, I decided to continue with photography after the meal.

I headed for Barnet Marine Park, a place I don't often go to. I was hoping to find interesting things in tidepools. That hope didn't quite pan out, but I did find a few things along the shore. The first thing I found was a sea star, purple in color. In a great fit of inventiveness, someone named this species the Purple Star.

Unfortunately, Purple Stars can also be brown or yellow, as their latin name, Pisaster ochraceus, implies.

The shoreline that the Purple Star was on was a bit interesting. It was composed of old bricks half-covered with some sort of algae. I've seen sandy beaches, pebbly beaches, gravelly beaches, corally beaches, and rocky beaches, but this was my first bricky beach.

After a little shopping, I went back home to examine the day's photos. It turns out that the day had other plans for me, though. When I got up to the courtyard, I found my friend Max outside, chewing on some of the new plants in our garden. As I watched, Jodi, one of Max's humans, came out and gave Max a hard time for this (Jodi had bought and put the plants in the garden herself). Max looked suitably contrite when Jodi was being stern with her, but when Jodi turned around, Max let her true feelings be known. Lucky for me, I was ready with the camera.

That Max is a pretty expressive little lady.

I chatted with Jodi for a while, with David (Max's other human), and with another neighbor, Pat. It turns out that they were going down the quay to the fireworks that evening, and they invited me along. By this time, evening was almost upon us, and I decided to join them.

So in short order I found myself down at the market with friends as night was falling. We popped into the market to say hi to James, another of our neighbors, who runs the deli there. While I was inside, I fooled around with my camera a little, shooting from the hip. With some practice, one can learn to roughly aim and focus a camera when not looking through the viewfinder. Sadly, I haven't had that sort of practice, so I ended up with a lot of lousy photos. However, by chance I did get one nice one, an upwards shot of my neighbor David with a top view of others reflected off the glass ceiling above him. Photoshop helped make it presentable.

Okay, well, maybe that's not the biggest crowd in the world. We had gotten there early enough that most of the crowd was behind us, not in front of us.

I had used my wide-angle (12-24mm) lens on the above shot. Later on I put on my general-purpose (24-120mm) lens and got closer in on the explosions.

And that was it for me that Saturday.

Always trying to end with a bang,
Tom