MoonScape


New Photos
September 8, 2007

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After a little over two inches of rain, the pool above the rock crossing had water in it again, and was even trickling through the rocks . On Friday afternoon, it was beautiful with the sun slanting in through the trees. The west gully system has been healing slowly, off and on, for the past six years...changing from a long gouge across the land to a series of pools connected by trickles. In the past two years, waterline vegetation has enclosed all the pools, and this year, with the wet summer, one of the largest of these looks more like a healthy pond than an erosion path.
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This young female cardinal has a deformed beak--I don't know whether it's from disease or a genetic problem or trauma--though it's hard to imagine a bird surviving an injury that could rip up such a stout beak. However, she was flying and hopping around and she's not dead yet.
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I took a picture of a bird just like this last year and never did get it IDed. There's a pale (but not white) eye-ring, and the rest of the bird, except for the wings, is golden yellow. It does not have stripes on the breast (this one had been bathing, so its feathers are wet. I'm sure it's a warbler, by size and shape and behavior, but... Here's another mystery bird, probably also a warbler. There's yellow on two tail-feathers, but not all. Some yellow on the primaries, but they're not all yellow. It's not a white-eyed vireo (which, without binocs, was my first guess--the eye color is dark and the beak is straight, not hooked. So...?
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Now this one I know: a red-bellied woodpecker busily digging into a hackberry knothole for supper. In tandem, these Dusky Dancers are perched on a twig overhanging the main creek. At least five pairs were engaged in egglaying at the same time...it was dusk, and I had to use flash. Male Dusky Dancers turn lighter (in the thorax) while mating, I've learned. The female Dusky Dancers are, to my eye, unusually beautiful.
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Until this year, I'd never seen the melonette fruits ripe. Here's a green one--the size of a smallish grape, but it's really a melon--and a ripe one, which is black and looks like a small olive. The ripe one has a lovely delicate fragrance and its tiny amount of flesh is green.
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We don't see many tiger swallowtails, and when we do they're not cooperative about posing. This one sailed past me one evening and then landed on the far side of a giant ragweed. I tried to work around to get a clear shot, but this is the best I could do.

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