Ten days ago I took you with me while I searched for the redheaded woodpecker. And as you saw, we found the noisy little guy almost right away! So did we turn around and go home, having achieved our mission?
Hey guys! I’ll fly for a peanut!
Well of course not!
I know I’m out of focus but look at my beautiful, piano key, wings!
I have sooooo much to show you that it’s hard to choose! But I think you’ll enjoy our effort to get a good shot of the park’s smash and dash thieves, the brilliantly hued, but common, blue jays.
Who you calling common?
While other birds joyously drop down to hands filled with special treats, select a morsel and flit back up into the trees to enjoy their snacks, the blue jays stalk park guests, skulking up in higher tree branches, then drop lower to scout out the situation, as they wait for an opportunity.
This girl looks promising, she has whole peanuts, my favorite!
And when they see it, when the timing is just right, they swoop down, slam into the giver’s hand, grab the best treat and spill the rest of the seed on the ground as they dash back up into the trees to enjoy their spoils.
Oops, missed the jay.
The rest of the birds stay out of the way and watch. It’s a kind of entertainment for them, too.
Wow! I think the thief went that-a-way!
Plus they get to gather the leftovers from the ground after the blue jay’s dramatic exit.
We spent a lot of time standing in one place trying to get images of the blue jays coming down for their smash and dash.
Oops, missed again.
Mostly we got shots of the empty hand, or a blue jay behind.
I know my photographer friend has at least one excellent image of the blue jay just before it landed on her daughter’s hand, but my best shot was of him racing away.
He got the peanut and I got him!
We had so much fun trying to capture an image of the jays and watching the other birds. It was cold that day and everybody was hungry. I have lots of images of smaller and more polite birds that would like their stories told too.
We mourning doves get passed over for more exciting birds all the time.
I told them I wasn’t sure if you all were prepared for more bird blogs. After all, when you’ve seen one bird, you’ve seen them all…..right?
Wait! Don’t you want to see me too?
Of course not right!!! Stay tuned. I have lots of beautiful birds, and a special surprise that we found on our way out of the park that afternoon.
So apparently my parents don’t get that my breed originated from frigid Shetland Islands in Scotland where the weather is worse than anything they’ve endured. And that shelties, as a breed, love winter. Because when the temperatures here were forecasted to be below 0 F (-17.7 C) mom and dad dug out my sister Katie’s boots.
These are not a fashion statement, mom!
They said if I would please wear the boots on our abbreviated trips out to do my business, they would feel much warmer themselves.
Uh huh.
So yesterday mom started putting boots on my feet, all four of them, every time we went out. I didn’t resist but I certainly don’t help her. By the time she’s got all 4 on me she’s usually sweating.
I guess they don’t look too bad against the snow.
Then she has to get all her own paraphernalia on, sweatshirt and hat and scarf and coat and mittens and boots (only 2 for her). By then I’ve usually decided I don’t really have to go out after all. So I stand still in the foyer and refuse to move.
Yep. Mom loves it.
I think I’ve changed my mind, mom. I’ll stay in for awhile, OK?
Mostly I’m just messing with her. The first three times mom took me out I managed to throw off one boot every trip. But then that naked foot got really cold and I stopped running around and held it up and looked pathetic and she carried me back inside.
Win for the sheltie.
Well, they DO give me an elevated look, I guess.
Today mom has perfected the boot placement and has them on nice and tight and I can’t shake any off, so I decided to dance around out there and find sticks to chew on and play in the snow and not go to the bathroom, cause it was so fun.
Win for the sheltie.
Can I get these off now mom?
Mom does not appear to be having fun. Did I mention the wind-chill is -15 F? That’s -26 C! Mom says she’s leaving the stinking boots on my feet, even inside until I pee when we go out. But she was only kidding. She took them off when I asked nice, and I took a nap.
This boot thing is exhausting.
They say by this afternoon the temperatures will be back in the teens, maybe 14 or so (-10 C) and heck, that’s a heat wave, I can go out to pee without my boots, and I very likely will…cause between you and me?
It’s been awhile, a really long while, since I’ve been out to Kensington to feed the birds. A photographer friend and I have been talking about it for what feels forever – – stuff just got in the way. But this week we decided we needed to make it a priority, because the weather around here isn’t going to get any better.
Do you see what I see?
With negative wind-chill predicted for next week we decided to get out there Friday afternoon. And boy we’re glad we did because the sun actually came out while we were there. Yes it was cold, but back among the trees, out of the wind, it was magical.
Maybe if he looks at us he will be more obvious.
There’s a lot of content in the 765 images I took. Seven Hundred, Sixty-Five! That’s crazy! We were only out there maybe 2 hours. OK…maybe 3 hours. That’s 255 images an hour, or about 4 every minute…a picture every 15 seconds? Thank goodness it’s digital!
Anyway.
Well that’s more obvious.
The biggest reason I wanted to be out there with my camera was to find the redheaded woodpecker. Hard to believe that until a couple years ago I had no idea there was such a bird in my area. But then I saw pictures online from Kensington and one winter day I saw him myself!
I think he (or she) might be young. Notice the brown feathers between the eyes. Juvies have brown heads.
Now that I know what part of the park I’m most likely to see him, I steered my small party in that direction. Along the way we ran into a couple of other photographers (recognizable by the extra long, super cool 800mm lenses on their cameras) and spent a long time talking to them about camera bodies, lens length, f-stops, tips for bird photography and… wait for it…while we were standing there, 5 people talking camera stuff, the redheaded woodpecker arrived, with much noise and fanfare.
The black and white feathers on their backs make them very elegant birds.
Now that I’ve heard him I will be able to find him more easily because he makes a noise different than all the other woodpeckers around. He was definitely interested in us, just as I was interested in him.
One of the guys with the big camera lens told us that if we threw a whole peanut up in the air the woodpecker would come off the tree trunk and grab that peanut right out of the air! Since we did, indeed, have a peanut like that, he volunteered to throw it so we could try to get a picture of the bird in flight.
Portrait of a beautiful bird.
I failed miserably, shooting wildly and blindly, but I did get one image of the bird flying, kind of in focus, and I’m proud to have gotten that much!
Well, at least I got SOMETHING! That black thing at the bottom is the photographer’s hat.
We had so much fun and spent almost 2 hours standing in one place a bit further along the trail, at a magical tree that was filled with all sorts of birds. Even the redheaded guy came back around. But that all will have to be saved for another post.
Who’d of thought that I’d be writing to you a mere week after my last contribution to mom’s blog? Obviously mom’s life is pretty boring if she’s willing to hand over communication control to me!
But I’m a sheltie — I never ignore an opportunity to communicate! (Sheltie moms and dads know this is true!)
So anyway. We got a bunch of snow last night. Not as much as some of you, but maybe a little more than 4 inches. It’s soft, powdery snow and mom had this brilliant idea that I might want to play in it. Cause, as you know, I’m a sheltie and stuff.
Me on the road outside my house.
Yesterday mom had been up at the neighbor lady’s house drinking tea and talking about important stuff like me. The neighbor lives on a big lot, way back off the road and has a wonderful yard that backs up to woods. Mom thought it would be a fun place for me to play, far away from the road.
So when we woke up to all this snow mom got permission to take me up there to play. Unfortunately she didn’t clear it with me first.
So mom and I are trotting up the nice lady’s driveway and I figure we’re just out there for me to do my job, so I pee and mom says good girl, and I turn around to go home. Because that’s what I always do after I pee, I go home.
Me in the nice lady’s backyard under protest.
But mom says, no, no, baby girl we’re going to keep going up this driveway. Well! I hadn’t been up this driveway before and there was a big camper up there with a cover and there were cords swinging in the breeze and they were scary so I barked at them a lot and I turned around to go home!
And mom said, no, no, baby girl come on up this driveway and she drags me up there and around to the back of the house and I’m scared and I don’t understand and mom finally figures out I’m shaking so she picks me up and cuddles me and walks, carrying all 27 pounds of me, around the yard a bit until I settle down, and then she puts me down figuring I’ll run around sniffing some and I immediately poo.
And when I get done pooing I pull mom toward the driveway so I can go home! Cause that’s what you do after you poo, you go home! And mom is looking for a bag to collect the poo and realizing she forgot to bring one and all the time I’m pulling her back toward home.
Me heading home where I belong.
Mom decided to give in and we trotted all the way back down the driveway and back to my yard, where, once I was safe and sound on familiar ground I played with my leash and attacked her boots and chased snowballs just like normal.
And after I went inside mom walked all the way back up the nice lady’s driveway with a bag and collected my poo.
When she finally got home she was pretty cold and wet and discouraged so we took a nap on the sofa. I slept on top of her to make her feel warm and safe and loved in return for her carrying me around that scary yard.
Me keeping my mom safe and warm.
But before we have another adventure like that I’m going to have to have a serious discussion with mom. Yep, no more surprise adventures when we don’t even get in a car! How’s a girl supposed to know it’s an adventure anyway!
Seriously, mother?
Talk later, your adventure-less girl, Penny.
The nice lady’s house is way up there, far away from my house!
I’m in another one of my funky, can’t figure out how to do stuff, phases. You know how it is (or maybe you don’t), you’re bee-bopping along doing stuff you’ve always done and suddenly something doesn’t click.
Sometimes literally.
Shooting through a window, with the glare of other windows reflected and struggling to focus.
Earlier this month I questioned whether I should print my blog, as a way to preserve it. Several of you had ideas, and others of you had wondered about their own blogs, so were following along.
Last week I wandered around the PixxiBook site, (thanks Linda!) a company that prints blogs into hard covered books with a really easy interface. They have options of choosing which posts you want to print, or you can choose a specific time period.
My issue is, and always will be, the size of my blog. I’ve been writing here since 2006, with over 3,300 posts. Still I was curious.
So, after a few days of thought, I put my URL into their ‘go ahead and try it’ box and it started to go to work. Pretty soon I could preview the results, and I enjoyed very much reading the first couple years of posts in the format the printed version would appear.
Back then I had no images, and the posts were shorter than my ramblings of today. It was fun to reread all about being in grad school as an older student.
Meanwhile the PixxiBook machine was still churning. When I finally backed out of the site several minutes later it had made it through 30% of my blog, indicated there would be 40+ books and the cost was edging up over $4,000.
I smiled, because obviously there’s no way I can ever afford to put my entire blog into hard covered books. It would be bigger than an encyclopedia set! But I will print a few years worth, perhaps those early days in school. And there is potential to just pull the Katie posts out and put them in one book, though I think that will take some work on my part.
Then, later in the week, I was working on a Christmas present, putting photos from a summer adventure into a photo book for someone and I was struggling!
Now, I’ve one projects like this a hundred times, but this time things felt different. I couldn’t find the book template I wanted to use, I couldn’t find the save button, though I remembered that while making my Penny 2025 calendar the system had saved on it’s own, so maybe that was it, I couldn’t get the photos imported…nothing was working the way I remembered it should work.
I spent a couple hours and got only a quarter of the book built when I had to stop for the day.
And, you guessed it, when I went back the next day nothing I had done had been saved. And I struggled all over again finding the pieces I needed to build the book. In the end I did the best I could and the book is designed and ordered and hopefully soon on it’s way to it’s forever home. But geeze.
AND during all this my Lightroom photo editing system decided I’d run out of storage. I have both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, which I pay a subscription for.
I’d always meant to use Lightroom Classic, because I don’t really want my photos to be stored by someone else in a cloud. But I accidently started with the cloud version, and I never wanted to stop and learn Lightroom Classic.
Franky, when I took the time to go explore Classic it seemed less intuitive and I couldn’t even figure out how to import a photo to it, so I stuck with the Cloud. But now my cloud is full and I really don’t want to pay more, especially with Classic sitting right there on my laptop. So I forced myself to figure it out.
And I’m slowly, very, very slowly, moving that way. I have edited the photos you see on this post using Classic. I’m not entirely happy.
And, speaking of not being happy, I have a new camera and I don’t have it all set up the way I want it yet. Because of course the new camera isn’t exactly like the old camera, otherwise, what would make it new.
Right?
So as I’m trying to take photos of this hawk that was hanging out on my deck and around my birdfeeders, terrorizing my little birds, I couldn’t get it to focus. That’s always been my problem with the Nikon Z series.
There’s a back of the camera focus button which I like to use v.s. using the shutter focus. I thought I had programed the camera to use the back button option, but while taking these photos, I’d focus using the back button, and when I actually pressed the shutter to get the shot it would REFOCUS and because there were so many branches it would focus on those instead of the bird.
Big sigh.
Lucky for me the hawk was concentrating on the little birds trapped in a briar bush below the deck and not me. He (or she) stood still for long periods of time. I finally just put the camera into manual focus and tried that way.
I still have to fix the focus problem, but that means figuring out more stuff. And I’m so tired of trying to figure stuff out these days. I might just go take a nap instead.
Here’s hoping you are having a much more productive and less frustrating month than I am!
No little birds were injured during the writing of this post.
On this frigid Michigan morning, with high temperatures predicted to be in the mid teens (F) and wind chills below zero, I think it’s only appropriate to talk about socks. This is the kind of morning that I want to snuggle up on the sofa with comfy warm clothes under a blanket and my dog, and contemplate life’s mysteries.
Over the years I have purchased many warm socks. To my knowledge they all arrived in pairs, two of each pattern, color and style. But for many weeks I have only been able to find matching pairs on a handful of occasions. Unless there’s a huge pile of socks behind the dryer I suggest that my dog has hidden them on purpose.
This morning, with the wind blowing snow across the driveway, Penny and I head out into the dark to do her business. On my feet are mismatched socks. After all, who decided socks need to match anyway?
Change Is Hard 