Point of View

It's time, once again, for PJ's photo blogging challenge. The challenge for the month of April was "Point of View." Now, I think this can be interpreted in a variety of ways, so here's what I came up with for last month.

Bracket Field

I live near a large regional park and last month I took advantage of the free parking in the off season on weekdays to do several hikes in the park. The one large hike that I did last month took me around the perimeter of the park, slightly over 9 miles all told. The trail is mostly a fire road, so it's wide, but it does take us into some interesting areas. There is a small airport (Bracket Field) along the northeast corner of the park and I got to see several small private planes take off as I walked along the trail. Not much you can really do with this point of view other than to take the underside of the plane. Interestingly, it's also the only shot of the five that I've chosen that isn't predominantly brown, so I have that point of view going for me as well.

Ground level

Early in the hike, I almost stumbled upon a garden snail. I found this particular animal kind of intriguing, mainly because normally, when I see these kinds of snails, they're usually found in a fairly wet environment. Not so for this guy as he was in the middle of a pretty dry trail. Although, I will admit that the year so far has been one of the wettest we've had on record, which could be the reason this snail was so exposed. Either way, I decided to get down as close to ground level to get a good up close and personal shot of the snail as it traveled along its way, heading for the other side of the trail.

Many times, I'll try to encourage snakes to get out of the trail and I even moved a tortoise we found in the middle of a dirt road off of the road so it wouldn't become road kill later on, but for some reason I didn't do this with the snail. Not sure why outside of the fact that it is not a native species to the area. Still, from its point of view, it probably has only known that one area where it has called home. I guess I should keep that in mind for the next time as I did encounter several bicyclists on the trail and kept wondering, did they miss this guy as he made it across the road? Who knows? But at least I can help it along if I encounter other animals in the middle of the trail, especially the slow moving ones.

Animals from a different point of view

As noted above, we've had a lot of rain since the beginning of the year. For comparison sake, we average in my area about 13 inches of rain per year, which is why we're classified as a semi-desert. Last year (January to December), we received slightly over 35 inches of rain. This year, we've already received over 23 inches of rain since January 1st. Granted we are moving into the dry season in Southern California, but most people who know our climate or have lived here for awhile know that's a lot of rain for our area.

But because of this, we get a different point of view of some animals that we don't see very often. If you've been paying attention, you know that I love animal encounters and will go out of my way to photograph animals in the wild. Very rarely do I get to encounter deer in our local foothills. I didn't see the deer that made these prints, but because of all the rain, I did get a decent shot. I'm sure these prints are no longer up there on that particular trail due to other foot and bicycle traffic, but from my point of view, it will always be there.

Desert tortoise

On the last weekend of the month, a friend of mine and I went up into the desert to do some geocaching. As we were traversing down this dusty one and a half car width dirt road, we came over this rise and I saw this big California desert tortoise in the roadway. Fortunately, my friend who was driving, was able to stop in plenty of time. These tortoises are endangered species and are protected over their range, which we were obviously in at the time. One of the things that you're not supposed to do is disturb them. That being said you do have permission to move the animal off of a roadway for its own protection. You're supposed to move it to the side of the road, in the direction that it was heading.

So we got out of the car and I gently lifted the tortoise off the roadway and off over the bank into this area where it was heading. I wanted to be as gentle as possible since if they feel like they're being threatened, they will sometimes void their bladder in an act of self defense. This isn't a good thing for the tortoise since now it doesn't have its natural water reserve. Fortunately, it didn't do that and as I moved it, I also checked to see if it was a male or female. The curved underbody of the shell told me it was a male and a good sized one at that. If you look closely at the hind legs, you'll see nice long claws which are used for digging burrows in the ground. Those are about a quarter inch in length and from the front of its shell to the back, it was about 14 inches in length. This was also the first time I've ever encountered a desert tortoise in the wild, so I had that going for me as well.

Different camera

For the first time in awhile, I got my Canon DSLR camera out of its bag and took it on a hike later in the month. It had been about 2 and a half years since I last used the camera and I felt it was high time I got it out, dusted it off and use it again. I had posted about this on Facebook previously, but the reason for not using it were a variety of things. I hadn't been satisfied with the way it was dealing with different kinds of light, especially harsh midday light and on one of my road trips, I just didn't use it and relied solely on my phone for photos. I've been happy with the results of what I've been taking recently with my phone, but from my point of view, it was limited, especially when it came to taking wildlife photos.

That came to a head a couple of days before I got this shot of a gopher snake, when I spotted a couple of coyotes in a field. I got a decent video with the phone, but couldn't get a really good close up shot. After I got home, I got the camera out, put it through some paces and then took it out on a hike where I got this shot of a gopher snake "tasting" its surroundings. So I guess what I'm saying here is depending upon the point of view I want to convey will probably determine which camera I use. I'm not going to confine myself to one particular lens anymore.

And there you have it, my take on the Point of View challenge for this month. Please stop by PJ's page to see how others did this challenge. Please feel free to comment here.

Checking on Caches

Today, I went on a hike up in the Claremont Wilderness Park. It was the first 5 mile hike doing one of the loops in several months and it really felt good to get out on the "trail." You'll notice I put the word trail in quotes. Park of the trail, as you can see here is a maintenance road leading up to a microwave tower on the hill overlooking this part of the wilderness park. When I hike, I always come up that way as it's pretty slippery and I'd rather slip going uphill as opposed to downhill. I very rarely take that particular trail downhill for that reason.

Anyway, part of the purpose, besides just getting out and enjoying the 75 degree January weather we're having, was to check on some of my caches along the trail since I hadn't been up this way in awhile. I'm happy to report that the ones that I checked on, all were right where they should be. 

I used to always worry about cache maintenance a lot and didn't have many cache hides, because I felt that if I had a lot of cache hides, then all my time would be taken up in cache maintenance and not cache finding. But over the years, I've gotten a different attitude regarding caches. First, you don't have to check on all of them all of the time. Second, pick an area and just check on the ones in that area. It works for me now and I'm still able to maintain a good balance between the two aspects of geocaching.

After checking on the caches along this part of the trail, I then headed into the interior of the park. Most of the hard part, the uphill slog along that slippery road was done and the rest of the hike was predominantly downhill on good dirt fire roads. I got to enjoy the views and the good weather. 

As I started working my way down the other side of the canyon, I descended into one of my favorite parts of the trail. It follows a stream that is intermittently wet and dry depending upon the season. There's lots of sycamore trees lining the creek bank which means it's usually cool, green and shady in the summertime, but today I could see lots of sky since the sycamores have dropped their leaves. I've also encountered several snakes and other wildlife in this section, but saw none today. Even the lizards which seem to be everywhere were only venturing out in the really sunny areas and this part wasn't sunny because of the lateness of the day.

I noticed some of the first weedy plants were starting to grow in this area too. I was particularly intrigued by the patterns on the leaves of this plant. I'm not sure what kind it is and I'm sure I wouldn't want to bushwhack through it. Look closely and you can see some nasty spikes on the end of each lobe of the leaves of this thing. Whatever it is, it definitely wants to protect itself, although, I seriously doubt it would stand a chance against a deer if they wanted to partake in eating it.

With more rain expected in the area in the next 10 days, the next time I get up on that part of the trail, the growth will be substantially lusher and taller. That's perfect, in my estimation.

Warm Weather Means.....

Today's post is more of a public service announcement, both to you as a reader and to myself, as I've found I've gotten into some bad habits on the trail that need to be corrected now, before the warmer weather really sets in. I was out on a hike today and I literally almost stepped on this guy. As you can see, he's already been in at least one scuffle in his lifetime as he's clearly lost his tail at some point in order to escape getting eaten. Last thing he needs is to be out sunning himself and have some idiot hiker almost step on him because said hiker is too absorbed in his phone. Yeah, that would be me.

As the weather warms up, all sorts of critters are out and about again. I haven't seen a snake since last November, but that doesn't mean they're not out there, it just means I haven't seen one yet. My mindset has always been, if the lizards are active, so are the snakes. So, needless to say, this was a wake up call for me to start scanning the trail in front of me for possible hazards. Just as in driving, the phone can wait, and besides, why do I need to be looking at my phone when I'm out communing with nature?

The second thing I've noticed is an abundance of flowers starting to bloom and lots of new growth along the trail. At this point, almost all of the poison oak has started to sprout again and there's plenty of areas where it's beginning to encroach on the trail and other areas. I had to archive one of my recent geocaches that I hid, because I didn't notice the beginnings of poison oak starting to grow near where I hid the cache. Now the area is overgrown with poison oak and I don't really want other cachers to get poison oak, so I removed the cache. "Leaves of three, let it be."

Because a lot of people don't know what poison oak looks like, I tend to avoid any and all dogs on the trail during this time. It kills me, because I'm such a dog lover, but if their owners don't know what poison oak looks like, then they're probably allowing their dogs to brush up against the stuff. It doesn't hurt the dog, but the oils will get all over the fur of the dog. If you pet a dog on the trail, all of that oil is just going to get on your hands and now you have poison oak. I've had it once and trust me, you don't want to get it as the rash is pretty painful.

And one last thing. Warmer weather also brings more people to the trail. Just like in driving, stay to the right when ever possible and yield to the uphill climber. Going downhill you have all the momentum with you and you can get it back again very easily, but uphill hikers need that momentum and it takes more energy to stop and then start moving against gravity. I guess the key thing is to be courteous. We need more of that in the world anyway.

Get Out and Play

Once again, it's time for P.J.'s monthly photo blog challenge, and once again, I've been remiss in not writing more here since this is literally the first post in over a month. I missed all of October, but then again, I could argue that I was following the theme of the month, which is Get Out and Play. Yeah, that's my story and I'm sticking with it. Needless to say, I went out and played this month, taking my first out of state road trip since before the pandemic hit. I hiked, I camped, I took lots of photos, so it was difficult to whittle down all the photos I took into just five shots, but I tried my best. Here are my five shots for this month.

1. A unique icon

Those of you who have been following along on this wandering that I do, know I love to geocache. One of the things that has kept me interested in the game are challenge caches - a cache that gives you a challenge to fulfill. 

My first stop in Arizona was the Tucson area for two reasons: 1. Saguaro National Park, a place I'd never visited before and 2. The only webcam in the entire state of Arizona. Now, I know what you're probably thinking. "There's only one webcam in the entire state?" Well, there's only one webcam that's also a geocache in the entire state and it's located on the campus of the University of Arizona. So I ended up walking around campus that first day, looking for the webcam. Now usually, you'd just go to the coordinates and find the cache, but this one was a little bit trickier than that. You were told what building you needed to find, but the coordinates weren't at that particular building, but rather near a campus directory. Eventually I made my way over to where the webcam was and took a screenshot on my phone of me looking like I'm having a conversation with a fire hydrant on the university's campus.

On a side note, before smart phones, these were event tougher, because you literally had to phone a friend and have them get a screenshot on their computer. I did that here as a back up in case I wasn't able to get my own shot, but for this blog entry, I'm using my own photo. And this also gave me my 9th different icon, or type of geocache, in the state of Arizona, second only to California.

2 & 3. Saguaros

As noted above, the national park was one of my "must see" stops on my road trip to Arizona. I'm a national park enthusiast and this particular park has been on my bucket list forever. When we used to travel to Arizona to visit my uncle who lived in Scottsdale we never got as far as Tucson, but we could see saguaro cactus pretty much everywhere on the drive over to my uncle's house. They are fascinating and so the park which was a national monument at the time went on my bucket list. 

I never got to take the kids to see the park when they were growing up mainly because there's no car camping in the park, only backcountry camping. And so it sat there on my list until this past month when I decided that it was time.

I had plans to hike to a virtual geocache in the park, but the road leading up to that particular trailhead was closed while I was there, so I spent part of the morning walking a short nature trail in the park and the rest of the morning hiking on a trail in Tucson Mountain Park which is located to the east of the western portion of Saguaro National Park. The National Park is broken into two different sections, one located to the east of Tucson and one located to the west. The black and white photo, which I've entitled "The Clouds Laugh" was taken in Tucson Mountain Park while I was hiking and finding a couple of geocaches.

4 & 5. Chiricahua National Monument

My second stop on this trip was in Chiricahua National Monument in southeastern Arizona. The backstory for this park comes from a student I had probably 18 years ago. When I was teaching, my school room was always plastered with posters from various parks that I had visited or wanted to visit in the future. One day in class, this student came up to me and asked if I'd ever been to Chiricahua National Monument before. When I answered in the negative, he proceeded to tell me how beautiful the park was and what a neat place it was and he spent the better part of several class periods extolling the virtues of this park. When a 13 year old kid is that excited about something in nature, you pay attention and so this park went on my bucket list as well.

My plan was to camp here for two nights and enjoy a full day of hiking and sightseeing in the park, before heading back to Phoenix where I'd spent one more night before coming home. As I was setting up my tent at my campsite, I was interrupted by a couple of coatimundis wandering through the campground. I'd seen photos of them, but have never seen them in the wild, so this was really a thrill for me. 

These two were very skittish and took off as soon as I walked a little bit closer, so I didn't get a photos of them, but my luck definitely changed the next day as I had an entire troop of around 15 coatis wander through the river bed behind my campsite.

The troop, composed of females and youngsters wandered in the river bed and fortunately, I had my camera ready, just in case. They'd send the younger coatis up the juniper trees to pick berries and while feeding themselves up in the tree, they'd also drop berries down to the others waiting below.

Once they left, I packed up my gear and headed up to the top of the park where I'd take my hike in the Heart of the Rocks loop. My goal was to see some of the geological features of the park up close and to also get the Heart of the Rocks virtual cache there. The last photo posted here is the Pinnacle Balanced Rock and is pretty typical of the types of formations you can see in this park. 

Most of the formations are created by freeze and thaw cycles, so eventually, this particular formation will fail, but others will eventually also be created through this cycle as well. I did a second hike into an area called the grottos where the rock pillars are very close to the trail and several of the pillars have collapsed against each other. There is one point in the grotto where you can sit directly underneath a very large (garage sized) boulder being held in place by two neighboring pillars. Yeah, I sat there for a little bit.

And there you have my five photos of when I got out and played last month. Please stop by P.J.'s site and see how others got out and played last month. Please feel free to comment here. I will respond back and I don't bite. As always, thanks for dropping by.

Birds in the Breezeway

About two weeks ago I noticed a bird flitting around in the breezeway between our garage and the main part of our house. Now, there's all sorts of stuff in the breezeway, mostly geocaching stuff, but there's also several containers, boxes, buckets and baskets. This bird, or actually these two birds kept flying in and out of the breezeway and eventually I figured out they were building a nest somewhere in the breezeway. By just sitting there, I also eventually figured out they were building the nest in the wicker basket. The lid to the white plastic bucket in the photo had been casually thrown into the wicker basket and it created a void underneath, with an opening about the size of a small bird, but not large enough for most predators. It was really a perfect place for them to set up housekeeping.

And of course, because I'm me, I had to see what the nest looked like and so I carefully lifted the plastic lid. Immediately, the bird that was sitting on the nest flew off leaving behind a perfectly empty nest. So, they were still in the process of building their home and hadn't settled down to family life yet. I carefully put the plastic lid back down and hoped that I hadn't scared them off from their nest. 

Fortunately, I spotted one of them the next day with more nest building materials, so I knew that their home was still being built and I hadn't scared them off. I'm pretty sure, based on everything that I've researched, that I have a pair of Bewick's Wrens nesting in that wicker basket. For a timeline, the first photo was taken March 27th and the second photo was taken on April 7th.

A couple of days went by and I stopped seeing the birds, so I was worried that they may have abandoned the nest, so I gingerly checked it again. No birds were in the nest, however, as the photo indicates, there were three little eggs now residing there, which meant that momma and papa were probably close by. As you can see by the first photo, they really did pick a choice location, as the spot gets a lot of warmth from the afternoon sun, which means they don't have to spend all their time sitting on the nest. I'm not sure of this particular bird's nesting habits, but I know other birds routinely leave their nests, so it's kind of nice that they're going to be naturally heated while the parents are away.

Last night, April 8th, I was sitting out in the breezeway talking with a friend of mine on the phone and I heard animal rustlings. This, in itself is not surprising, because we have quite a number of different kinds of animals that have come through our back yard from time to time, from squirrels and lizards, to possums, skunks and raccoons, not to mention a flurry of different kinds of birds. So naturally, I looked to my right to see what was making the noise and one of the wrens was sitting on the edge of a plastic bucket about two feet from where its mate was probably sitting on the nest, so I definitely know they're actively taking care of the eggs now too. 

For scale in your own mind, the cup of the nest is about 2.5 inches in diameter with an overall diameter of the nest on the order of about 5 to 6 inches. Although the photo doesn't show it very well, there are three eggs in there and who knows if they've laid some more after that photo was taken a couple of days ago. Incubation for the eggs is roughly 14-16 days, which means they could begin hatching as early as this upcoming Tuesday or as late as the 21st of April. Needless to say, I'll be keeping you posted as we await the chirping of little ones coming from the interior of that wicker basket.

Now I need to dig out the large bird feeder and fill it with some appropriate seed for the parents to use. And I also think that if everything had been put away correctly, they'd be nesting someplace else, so I guess it sometimes pays to be a little bit messy or disorganized.

The Great Outdoors

For those of you who follow me on Facebook, you've already seen this, but I thought this was rather apropos for P.J.'s photo blogging challenge for this week, The Great Outdoors. So yeah, I'm cheating a little bit since this is actually a collection of 10 photos that I took on a hike this past week, but they work for the theme. 

The hike is an extended hike in a park up in the foothills above my house called the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park. It has a nice 5 mile loop that I extended to make it almost 7 miles. The trails up in the foothills intersect at various locations and the first photo is the sign where the parking lot for the park is located. From there, the trail then splits into either Burbank or Cobol Canyon and those two trails meet on the back side up in the hills. I went up the Cobol Canyon side and then extended it into Johnson's Pasture, which is a large portion not really part of the loop, but has several trails that run through. The hike then continues through Johnson's Pasture and back into the neighborhood where I parked my Jeep.

In June of 2019, I wrote for another photo challenge about encountering a bear on this trail near the back side up at a higher elevation. I've encountered a variety of wildlife on this trail, but it was relatively quiet on this hike.

I found a new app called Relive, which takes your data as you walk and then puts into satellite images to give you a 3D video of your hike. This video is the second video I've created. Neither one is perfect. The first one, I forgot about the aspect ratio and so the edges were cut off so you couldn't see the data. This one has all of the photos interspersed on the hike, but I think it breaks up the hike aspect of it too much. I'll be working with this app in the future as I go on more and more hikes now that the weather has finally started to cool down again.

So here's my interpretation of The Great Outdoors. Please stop by the link at the top of the page to see how others interpreted this them for this month.

Letters

I seriously thought about not writing a blog for P.J.'s photo blogging challenge for this month. Those of you who follow this blog know that I enjoy photography and I didn't really want to post five photos of exactly the same thing (you'll understand when you get to my last photo here). So then I thought of a different way I could present the theme of Letters, without having to show a letter in each photo, and so you're getting an entry similar in style to how Sesame Street does it's letters, or how kindergarteners learn what kind of things begin with what kinds of letters. So here's my interpretation of the theme Letters for the month of July.

G is for Geocoins and Geocaching

Most of you know I like to geocache, but I haven't been getting out a lot during this pandemic. I like to geocache with others and that isn't really feasible at the moment, so I get out when I can, but I don't like caching nearly as much when I'm caching alone, and so I'm not caching as much.

I do, however, still enjoy talking about geocaching and participating in groups, such as the Facebook group, Worldwide Geocaching. That group  has weekly giveaways and these geocoins were offered as a giveaway about a month ago. I entered and my name was essentially pulled out of a hat and I ended up winning them. Since they have letters on them as well, I decided to use this as my initial photo for this essay.

C is for Comet

This past month, Comet Neowise (C/2020 F3) has been all the rage and I've been seeing some pretty spectacular photos of the comet on the internet. Sadly, because I live in an area (Southern California) that is heavily light polluted, I wasn't able to get really spectacular shots, but we did go out several times while the comet was closest to the Earth and I was able to get a couple of shots that I felt showed it and the tail. 

I'm usually not much in for filters on Instagram, but I decided to see if any of the filters there would enhance the shot enough that you could see the tail a little bit better. As it turned out, a couple of the filters did, so when I posted this shot to my Instagram account, the tail was much more visible than had I just posted the standard image I'd take that night.

Locating the comet was the toughest part of the shot. We used an app entitled Sky Guide, which allows you to search for particular things in the night sky and once we figured out approximately where the comet would be, I aimed the camera on a tripod up and took an initial shot. The comet was difficult to see with the naked eye, but the prolonged exposure of the camera allowed us to see the tail, even if we couldn't see it just standing there. From there on, it was taking different 30 second exposures until I felt I'd gotten a good enough image that I could post somewhere.

W is for Wall

A couple of weeks ago, at 4 o'clock in the morning, our wall separating our yard from our neighbor's yard fell over. Now we're in the process of getting a contractor to fix the wall. The wall was 60 years old, built to 1959 building codes and wouldn't have passed code today. Our contractor is going to repair the wall, including upgrading it so that it will meet builder's code for today. Once repaired, we won't have this nice hole between our two properties. At the least the part that was the retaining wall of the wall did was it was supposed to do. Only the part above the retaining wall fell, so that's a good thing.

H is for humor

I started to put this down as S is for Squirrel, but when I posted this on Instagram and Facebook, everyone said it looked exactly like the squirrel was fishing. Believe it or not, I hadn't really seen that aspect of the shot. I was more thrilled that I'd seen a native Gray Squirrel as opposed to the invasive Eastern Fox Squirrel that seems so prevalent in this area right now. Now that I look at the shot, it does look like this little guy is fishing. The only thing that would make this even better would have been if there had been a cobweb on the end of the little branch.

R is for Rocks

Since the pandemic started and we've been on shelter in place, I haven't taken many hikes, but I have done a lot of walking around the neighborhood. There have been several things that I've noticed that are not wildlife related and one of them have been these painted rocks.

Most of the rocks that I've noticed have a certain style to them indicating there's one particular local artist who is enjoying creating them and distributing them around throughout the neighborhood. Some of the rocks have disappeared, but many of them have stayed providing a bit of whimsy to people who walk by or encouragement in these trying times. I felt this one was rather appropriate in which to end this particular essay. Please stay safe dear readers.

And that does it for this month's photo blog. As stated above, I didn't want to post only rocks, so I chose to interpret it a different kind of way. I hope you enjoyed my interpretation of Letters. As always, please feel free to comment. I usually respond within a day and I promise I won't bite.

My World

I don't participate every month is P.J.'s Monthly photo blog, but this month's theme (Your World) made for a fairly easy set of photos. I know I really should attempt them every month, so I'll try to do better in the coming months. I've picked up my DSLR again since I've been in "shelter and place" and I have a lot of photos to choose from this month. I think I could probably come up with at least 10 different shots, just from my walks around the neighborhood over the past month, but here's my 5 that captures my world this month.

1. Weathervane

I'm a sucker for cool things like sundials and weathervanes. This particular weathervane is located on top of a house north of me, but in the same general neighborhood. Since I don't take the same route, I don't see this every day, but I noticed it early in the month and thought I really should take a photo of it, since it represents some interesting architecture, especially for Southern California. You don't see too many of these and I like that it gives off a New England kind of vibe. The only give away is the palm tree in the lower left hand corner of the shot. I could have edited that out, but that would have meant cropping some of the cupola out and I wanted that to be the main focus of the shot, and so the palm tree remains.

I remembered the next time I was out to take a photo of it, but the quality of the iPhone shot wasn't what I considered good enough, so I ended up throwing those shots away. I don't take the DSLR out every day, so the next time I walked around the neighborhood with the DSLR, I made sure to walk up that particular street. Because the weather had changed, we had some clouds in the sky which made for a more pleasing background to the shot.

2. Amusement Park

Twenty years ago, I was really into Roller Coaster Tycoon and particularly, Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 (RCT2). The game is one of many out on the market that allows you to play amusement park scenarios, while creating an amusement park, maintaining a budget, building roller coasters of various kinds and making sure your peeps are happy. The thing about Tycoon 2 that made it so good as you could also create buildings into your park and really make your park look like the real deal, with interesting architecture and themed areas.

There are other programs out on the market now, but there's also OpenRCT2 which emulates RCT2 perfectly as long as you have the original disks, however it also comes with enhancements that allow you to play in Sandbox mode. In other words, instead of playing scenarios, you can just create your own landscape and build your own park. Needless to say, I've been playing a lot of OpenRCT2 the last couple of months and this is a screen shot of a flying roller coaster (one where the peeps lay down and it makes it feel like they're flying) that I built in one of my sandbox mode games.

3. Family FaceTime

Our immediate family is spread out with some in the Bay Area of California and the rest of us down here in Southern California. Under normal circumstances, I probably would have visited my daughter when she had her birthday at the end of last month, but couldn't due to shelter in place, so we FaceTimed. That has grown into a weekly event so that everyone can touch bases with each other and enjoy each others' company. My daughter suggested that we have weekly themes. Last week, it was crazy hats, this week, it was Toga. It's amazing what a couple of actual olive branches from the tree in the back yard and a sheet will do to help you win the theme for the week. 

This image got posted on Facebook earlier this week and everyone has had a good laugh at my expense, but it was worth it. I got my wife to smile/laugh in the background of the photo as well, so it's all good.

4. Ornithology

I don't claim to be an expert on birds, but I do have an interest in them and with spring here, there are lots of birds out and about, probably more due to the lack of people out and about. If the theme for the month had been birds, I would have been able to have five different kinds of birds with ease. I have a book that was published by the National Geographic Society entitled Field Guide to the Birds of North America and it has been quite helpful in letting me identify most of the birds I've seen while out on walks around the neighborhood. This spring, I've seen California Towhees, Spotted Towhees, a Cooper's hawk, hummingbirds, scrub jays, two different kinds of sparrows, two different kinds of finches, and several Western Bluebirds, such as this one who posed ever so nicely on a branch in the park just north of my house. 

I'm pretty sure the Spotted Towhees and the Bluebirds are both nesting in some trees in the park. A friend of mine says that I've been lucky with the Spotted Towhees as they are usually heard and not seen, but I've been able to spot them on two different occasions. There are more than just a couple of bluebirds in the park. I've seen at least three different ones, which is why I'm fairly certain they're nesting somewhere in the park as well.

5. Earth Day

This year was the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day. I was in 6th grade at the time, so yeah, I know I'm old. Once again, under ordinary circumstances, I probably would have celebrated in some other way than sheltering in place, but there's not much I could do at this particular time. And so I take photos.

Besides birds, the insects are also out in force, particularly, the ladybugs. Insects and creepy crawlies give me different sorts of challenges, as unlike birds, you can usually get quite close to insects. I've been using a variety of lenses to take photos of ladybugs, honeybees, bumblebees, butterflies and other assorted insects and arachnids. This particular shot I used my 250 zoom macro lens to get up close and personal with a couple of bugs doing what nature intended them to do. I'm very pleased with the focus on this particular shot.

And that, my friends, is my interpretation of the theme, "Your World" for P.J.'s Monthly Photo Blogging challenge. Please click on the link and see how other people interpreted the theme of their world. As always, please feel free to comment. I won't bite.

Are You Talking to Me??

I recently got a pretty decent shot of an Eastern Fox Squirrel while on a walk in a local park. California has basically three types of tree squirrels, two of which are imported and obviously considered invasive species. The Eastern Fox Squirrel and the Eastern Gray Squirrel were both imported during the early 1900s and have flourished in this area, pushing out the Western Gray Squirrel. For more information on how you can tell them apart, check out this website.

While on my walk on a short nature path in the park, I spotted this Fox Squirrel eating on the path. It immediately scurried up the closest tree and sat in the crook of the first large branch of the tree to continue its snack. Most of the shots I took of it consisted of two paws on the branch and two paws holding and eating the nut, typical squirrel posture. Then it paused, put one paw down and clutched the nut with its one paw. The look made it look like it was pointing at its own chest. It then looked directly at me and that gave me the title of this blog entry: Are You Talking to Me??