effie yeaw nature center – Page 2

SSSSee Ya

It was hard to choose just one photo to upload today. I snapped some closeups of a beautiful great horned owl (a permanent resident at the nature center), a pair of tiger swallowtail butterflies on the bank of the river (one crawled around on my hand for a bit) and this scaly guy.

I’m normally very careful when hiking around by the river, and today was no different. It was hot out and I knew there could be snakes around, so I was making sure to scan both sides of the path… right up to the point when I became distracted by some turkeys on the other side of the trail – that’s when I heard hissing and rattling right by my foot! I jumped, the snake jumped, we went in opposite directions and fortunately that was the extent of the drama. Phew!

So, since this guy nearly gave me a heart attack, he gets to be the photo of the day. The rest of the photos are at my Flickr account if anyone wants to see owls and butterflies.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/skelly10/

Fly Fishing

I saw lots of raptors this evening while I was out walking, but only one osprey. I don’t usually see them on “my” part of the river, so even though the quality of this photo isn’t superb, it moved right up to the top of my photo of the day list. I didn’t see him catch a fish, but he did dive after them a couple of times. Hopefully he eventually caught something for dinner tonight.

Talons

I have no idea what happened to my June 3rd photo. Me being me, I trust that I took a photo that day, but I can’t find one with that date, so I’ll have to assume it was crap and was deleted in a fit of frustration. I looked through June photos that haven’t been posted here and was surprised that I never uploaded one of Echo, the resident great horned owl at the nature center near my house.

Looking at the date this was taken, I remember that Echo’s photo was bumped in favor of a rattlesnake I ran into that day. So, as a filler here is a close-up of Echo’s lethal talons. If I need a filler in the future, maybe you’ll get to see her face.

Or you can just look here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/skelly10/9161251343/

Little Dinosaur

Future Pipevine Swallowtail

Hard to believe this little creature may become a beautiful butterfly if all goes well.

So Deer

I saw quite a lot of deer during my evening walk, so I thought if I could manage to get a nice closeup shot, I’d use it for my photo of the day. This mother deer grooming her offspring elicited a number of “aww’s” from my group, so here you go.

Buteo Beauty

I noticed this hawk (I think it’s a Red-shouldered Hawk) sitting quietly in a tree during a late afternoon walk. They will typically fly away when humans come near, so this was a rare photo op for me as this bird didn’t seem to be bothered by my presence and stayed on its perch while I took a few pictures.

Tag: effie yeaw nature center