Hee Hee Ho Ho Ho!

giving thanks day

Mmmmm . . . ducky for dinner

what is this selling?

Home Depot Rat

time to play

Get the Stick!

you have to see this

OK Go - White Knuckles - Official Video

what kind of spider is this?

What is this spider? Click on the photo to see it larger. I photographed it down in Pennsylvania yesterday. HUGE body. Anyone know?

look here

As I was walking the beach on Lake Ontario, I came upon this creature, this crayfish/crawfish/crawdad—what other names do they have? It was 6-7 inches long and stood up as high as possible, claws and antennae waving to make itself look bigger than that. It was headed to the surf and, when it got there, it let it the water take it, tumbling past the waves' breaking point, swimming away quickly. Gone. Funny what one finds on beaches.

defense mechanism

Look how scary the back of this crab looks! Anyone know what this is? Leave a comment, if you do. I found this one on the Gulf of Mexico at Yankeetown, Florida.

heaven to hell in the blink of an eye

I've been traveling down the Gulf Coast of Florida today, through what is being called The Nature Coast. It's pretty much between Apalachicola and Crystal River, maybe a bit further south. I'm spending the next two nights at a very cool little cabin at The Pine Lodge in Inglis. I don't usually advertise businesses, but this place is wonderful. Quiet, clean, and it's where the film crew for Elvis Presley's movie Follow That Dream stayed. Don't bother going to the east coast of Florida. Go to the Gulf Coast and stay here.

These fiddler crabs were running away from me as I was photographing them. There were hundreds of them. Thousands! They are little, only about 1.5 to 2 inches long.

And then, looming over the beautiful wetlands and marshes is the Crystal River Nuclear Power Plant. A view like this is plenty to bring one back to reality.

this is what we saw

Village Creek State Park connects two parts of Big Thicket National Preserve. Village Creek runs through it and then there are these bodies of waters called sloughs, pronounced slew. Yup, that's right.
And then, we came across this red-eared slider, a turtle; she was laying eggs...can you see them in the hole?

snake alert

At Big Thicket National Preserve, where I am taking a field course on the ecology and natural history of the place, we came across this little-bitty grey rat snake. Nonvenomous, and here's how you can tell: the pupils are round like ours. On poisonous snakes, the pupils are vertical slits. So, although this fellow could—and did—bite, it wasn't harmful.

beggar

I arrived at Chicot State Park near Ville Platte, Louisiana, to find a welcoming committee of one blind-in-the-right-eye racoon. It was relentless in trying to get me to either feed it or let it into the cabin so that it could find the food itself. A mix of cat and dog and squirrel.

This is Cajun Country for real. Wi-fi is available at all the McDonalds in Louisiana. Here I sit, listening to the old guys who come here for coffee because the local coffee places are no longer (as is true in many parts of the country), listening to Cajun French mixed with English, sometimes. Interesting place, really.

careful

Live, scary, large, wild alligator. Did I say scary?
And wild. This is not some penned creature; this one lives at Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge, where I was the intruder. And, this one might very well be sitting on her nest. Maybe not, maybe. You tell me.

white deer

The herd of deer at Seneca Army Depot in the Finger Lakes of New York State has been fenced in since 1941, long enough that the inbreeding between the deer has allowed the white gene to be expressed more often than one seems to see in the wild. Hunting deer by the soldiers at the Depot was encouraged to keep the white deer alive and to take only the brown. This, of course, led to more white deer in the population. Now poor Seneca County is in charge of this land and has to make decisions about how to use it for its best economic gain. Currently, it conducts tours of the deer on certain weekends. See more here.

Funny how unnatural human actions—fencing in land for military installations, culling a herd—create changes in nature itself that are then considered to be natural. Only humans.

today's encounters

Mule Deer on the top, Pelican on the bottom; all on the Missouri River in the Lake Holter area.




























And what kind of snake is this? We each took a look at each other and went our separate ways.