I can see that Christmas cactus connection. A word I just came across online made me think of your beautiful forest & water world photos. Not a traditionally evolved word apparently but one made up in the last ten years. I like it anyway. Werifesteria meaning: ‘to wander longingly through the forest in search of mystery’, as given here Wild words: Werifesteria | earthstar
Came across it while booking AirB&B soon in Fort Bragg, California where we like to visit
the Mendocino Coast Botanical Garden, eat fresh seafood at Noyo harbor where there is also a dog beach on the Pacific. We’re taking our now 3 year old McNab herding dog on our first overnight trip away from home this summer. Our host who has two fenced acres, goats, chickens and a garden was very encouraging about taking on our 35 pound brute. I hope we hit it off as well in person as we did by text. You and Scot helped inspire me, @Kendel.
For @St.Roymond here are pictures of my munchkin: first this morning on my bed having just pushed her whacky ball off to enlist my play and the second recently in the garden, using all her senses to track the squirrel population.
I agree with you @St.Roymond about the value of dogs for socializing we male humans.
Knox saw his first squirrels last week. They were frolicking till they saw him and zoom! they were up a tree so fast I couldn’t see which tree they chose! I looked at Knox and said, “And you think you go ‘zooom’!”
What cracks me up is when the cheekier ones keep just the other side of a tree and keep the dogs running around it. Some don’t even bother to climb all that high.
May have posted this here before but probably not. Two earlier dogs who collaborated on keeping the squirrels away. From about a dozen years ago.
We spent much of yesterday hanging out at a pond in New Hampshire, mostly sitting with our feet in the water, chatting with friends, and watching newts in the water. Here’s one of the newts (an eastern newt, I believe):
Thanks. The hoverfly shooting was strictly a spray-and-hope operation – they were moving around too much for manual focusing. I had my camera on a tripod and cranked it forward and backward while I took ~90 exposures. This was the best of the lot.
Nah(*), it’s just another tool that you can use when appropriate.
(BTW, the newt above was shot handheld with manual focusing, also with my macro lens – definitely not cheating.)
(*) Well, there are some people who think you’re cheating if you’re not coating your own glass plates with silver halide emulsion, but it’s best to ignore them.
It’s very useful when what you’re shooting includes things that by the time the human eye sees something and your finger reacts to press the button the something you want to record is over. I used it to get shots of my previous service dog in the surf; I kept trying to anticipate and take a shot before what I wanted to get had yet happened and I ended up taking more shots that way than by holding down the button and taking a dozen shots in two seconds – the latter got what I was after far more often.
And the ones who insist that unless you’re using actual film you’re not a “real photographer”. When digital cameras were first coming out, the county fair split the photography competition into two sections!
An uncommon polypore mushroom found only on pawpaws recorded just a handful of times in Alabama and on inaturalist, the is whole time, only about 50 occurrences of it across the southeast. But most probably are not looking for it.
A beautiful creek that I let my dog splash in to cool off during our jog this morning…its name is Rattlesnake Creek, but I have never seen one of those there
