Three years ago, we picked up this young 4-1 apple tree (four types of apples grafted on a single root stock), and have had perhaps 15-20 apple starts each year, though the harvest was much less. In each of those years, there didn’t seem to be many bees around when the tree was blossoming.
This year, I thought I might help out with the pollination, but shortly after I went out with a q-tip, this bumblebee came by, and put me to shame. (S)he probably visited about thirty blossoms in the first couple of minutes, and didn’t linger on any one for much longer than five seconds. In looking at close-ups later, I saw the evolutionary wisdom of the natural world: pollen scattered over nearly every part of her body. So … as long as there are bees …
Shortly after we moved here, a neighbor predicted we’d be seeing fish in the strangest places: on lawns, in driveways, on roads. Lo and behold, a month later there was one in our driveway.
The ospreys in the area tend to drop the heavier ones flying back to their nests; such was probably the case with this catfish, which may have weighed as much as the bird itself. This was taken in the late afternoon; the next morning it was gone, scavenged by animals, or maybe just discarded by neighbors.
Last year the marsh behind our neighbor’s house was overflowing with great egrets, most of them juveniles. They stayed for a couple of weeks in early April, probably decimated the fish and and amphibian population in the place, and then were gone.
This year, just a few showed up, and I only photographed a couple of times: this adult, who proved a patient model, and later, a juvenile who would not even stick around for a single shot.
Their majestic beauty and placid manner belie skillful and ruthless abilities as predators; this one caught and swallowed a fish just one minute earlier.
A group of wild turkeys forage on cow manure recently spread over the field (those brown lines in the foreground), probably for the undigested corn from the cattle’s feed.
There’s a whole science to minimizing the cost of feeding cows, including harvesting the corn when kernels are at their peak maturity, decreasing the particle size of the corn kernels when ground, or using a bacterial inoculant in the silage to maximize fermentation (from an article here, thanks Google). My guess is that the small farmers in the area don’t really concern themselves much with those economics, probably for the same reasons we put up bird feeders in our back yard.
There’s a nice article here on the conservation effort over the past century that brought the turkey population in the US back from thirty thousand to seven million.
I was struck with the flaxen hues of many of the mown fields throughout southern VT last week, a color no doubt enhanced by the light rain that was falling throughout most of our trip. “Looks cold and bleak..”, says a friend from GA, where they are currently reveling in camelias and azaleas. If I was looking at this scene in November, with four or five months of winter to come, I might have agreed. But now, here in April, this scene is positively summer-ish, a prelude of the warmth to come.
Three views of a truck – perhaps a hundred yards out in a field – on a overcast day: the first is at 850mm with a Sigma 150-600mm Contemporary, the second is at 232mm with a Canon 70-200mm, and the third is at 64mm with a Canon 17-55mm. My Canon camera has a crop factor of 1.6, thus the longer actual reach. Each exposure was with Aperture Priority and automatic focus, and processed lightly in Lightroom, using only the Portrait mode.
At this point, I prefer the closeup. It has the simplest composition, the most color, and the mystery and intimacy of a portrait.
