Easter Bunnies

I took more photos of the Easter bunny weeds and wanted to show you a few more.  I love this flower!  They are so... well, expressive.  They just look like they are having fun.  Don't miss the little buttons on the leaves.  And to think, it is nothing more than a weed found on a lawn!

Remember, if you click on a photo, they will all be enlarged.

Spring Flower Show

If you want to see a great flower show, get down and crawl around on some one's lawn who doesn't take real good care of it.  Mine, for instance.  They are usually loaded with little flowers that you are more likely to step on than look at.  And most of them are just lovely when you examine them up close.  Most of these are pushing two inches tall - if they're lucky.

I'm not sure if these are classified as violets or not...

My Shy Violet

Most of you probably won't get the reference to "My Shy Violet," a tune made popular by the Mills Brothers.  Who?  Google it and add "You-tube."  They were before my time too, but you would hear the song once in a while, like you hear a Beatle's tune once in a while today.  Anyhoo...

Violets are ubiquitous on my lawn this time of year.  But I don't mind.  Maybe some people enjoy a monoculture of grass reaching out in all directions, but I enjoy looking down and seeing a little wild garden in blue here and there.  Makes me want to get down and crawl around...

The Colors of Easter II

There is a world of fascinating photographic subjects that is mostly overlooked.  In fact, most people do not even know they exist, even though they are right beneath our feet.  These "weeds" are a case in point.  You may have walked right over them in early spring without even noticing them since they are only about an inch tall.  Once the blooms develop, the flower stems grow to about three to four inches, but they are still so small as to go unnoticed.  I don't even know the name of this "weed."

Easter often occurs in March and that is when they appear, so because of that, and their color, I think of them as an Easter flower.  Plus, it helps that they look like little purple Easter bunnies.  Have you ever seen a more lovely "weed?"  Not only do they have the beautiful flower, but if you look closely at the leaves in the upper part of the plant, you will see a second type of flower which looks like a small velvety crimson button.  I think it might be one of the prettiest flowers I have ever seen and I'll bet not one in a hundred other people have ever seen it.  If they were a foot tall, they would probably sell like hotcakes, but they are reserved for those who take the time to look for them.

To capture these photos, the camera had to be directly on the ground - which brings up another point.  I could have gone out and plucked some of these flowers and arranged them for some photos, which would have been a whole lot easier.  But, I have a personal rule (or goal) to shoot subjects "in situ," i.e., in place just as I found them, and just as I will leave them.  In other words, "leave no trace" of my having been there.  If there happened to be some distracting trash or fallen branches in the frame, that is one thing, but I try not to alter anything when I take photos. 

An Advanced Engineering Degree

If I told you the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, the suspension bridge in San Francisco or the new Hoover Dam Bypass bridge were all built without consulting engineers, you would call me liar.  And you'd be right.  The idea that one of these structures could be built without careful planning or without an extended amount of time in book learning is inconceivable.  It takes a great designer to produce these structures.

The Great Designer, however, created this little engineer with all the tools it needs to construct it's engineering feat right out of the box so that it can thrive in the niche for which it was created.  Can you imagine being able to inherently construct one of these webs without all the specialized learning?

The spider is called an orchard spider.  Recent morning fog gave me

another chance to film these tiny (1/4 inch) spiders and their webs.

Kind of looks like a forest with a lot of satellite dishes, doesn't it?

The Colors of Easter

I know some of the familiar Easter colors are associated with the resurrection of Christ the King - the royal purples and reds.  What surprises me is how commonplace the colors of Easter are in the world around us at this time of year.  I'm going to do a few blogs on Easter colors over the next week or two and these three photos are the first to deal with this topic.

The name of the tree that puts out these "catkins" is called an American hop hornbeam.  We have quite a few of those around the edge of the yard.  They also produce a little nutlet in the fall that the squirrels love.  They always attract my attention and my camera lens.  I was using my "piece of junk telephoto," but as with a few other photos, I liked the effect of the not-quite-in-focus look.  The purple in the background is contributed by a redbud in my neighbors yard. 

Sometimes a very small change in shooting angle can completely change the background which can be used to advantage.  Don't always just snap the picture and walk away.  Work the angles to get the best effect.  This is better advice when using a telephoto lens or in macro photography, but it is something to keep in mind on any photo since bad backgrounds have the ability to absolutely destroy a good photo.  Having said that, I took the photos from my porch on a rainy day and couldn't change the angle by much.

Front Row Seats

Our front porch faces the woods and a little bit of my neighbor's back yard.  He had several trees topped a couple of years ago.  Most of them recovered, but one large one did not.  They removed too much of the top and left too few branches.  I didn't realize how much it has decayed until recently.  I happened to see a mated pair of the red-bellied woodpeckers that call this area home on the tree the other day.  The tree trunk splits into a "Y" at the top and they were chasing each other around one trunk and then the other.

The following day, my attention was drawn to that area because a red-belly spent the entire day in the area calling out.  The fact that it was there for so long was unusual since they are constantly on the move foraging on different trees looking for bugs.  I could hear the bird, but I couldn't locate where it was calling from.

The following day, the same thing occurred.  The red-belly was calling from the same area.  Only this time, I could also hear it thumping slowly on a tree.  Not the fast rat-a-tat sound you hear when they are drilling holes, but a much slower rhythm.  Looking closely to see where the sound was coming from, I spotted the male at the top of the tree I described earlier and he already had a pretty good size hole cut into the top of the tree.  The hole is roughly forty feet up the tree.  Looking at him through binoculars, I discovered how decayed that tree had become.  It had a pretty good growth of fungi around the edge, a sure sign of rotting wood.  I was surprised how close to the top of the tree the bird was building the nest.  I would think that if it rained for any length of time, the water would seep through the punky "roof" and the nest interior would be damp.

He has been at it for a two or three days now, carving out the interior.  You can tell how far along he is by how far into the nest he leans to bang away at the wood.  The wood chips are mostly left in place as nesting material.  The interior has to be pretty roomy, so he has got a lot of work to do yet.  He stops every once in a while and calls out to his mate.  I'm not sure if he is just checking on her, or he would like her to inspect his progress so far.  I haven't seen her come to the tree since the day they were both there.  So it looks like we are going to have front row seats to a nesting pair of red-bellied woodpeckers.  That will be fun to watch.