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North Topsail Island
Does anyone else travel to a destination and take more photos of the wildlife than their kids? Today we took a day trip to North Topsail and caught a few hours of play time before the rain came. I snapped a few cute ones of the boys, but they typically move too quickly or stick up a hand to block the photo (I don’t blame them for that). After we boogie boarded and body surfed, we walked down the shore to look for shells at low tide. Wookie helped me send the black bird into flight. We snuck up on birds at a tidal pool, and he waited for me…
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Juvenile Male Ruby-throated Hummingbird
Once I have a curiosity about something, I quickly let it cross over to passion. It happened with art, guitar, writing, pottery, gardening, and now – for the past year or two – photographing birds. I don’t “put a bird on it” as they do in Portlandia, and I’m not a good photographer as I’ve received no training and only have a point and shoot, but I love trying to get up close and capture them with the lens. Last night just after the sun set and the garden was quickly getting dim, when the hummingbirds are most active at the feeder, I crouched just behind the fence right below…
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Nature Pictures
I love the way God demonstrates his creativity in the smallest of creatures, even if some of them are decidedly creepy. My husband asked me why I keep taking pictures of bugs, and I had no response other than I saw them or that they were right by my face. Speaking of having nature in my face, I was walking the outside of the fence starting at some flowers when a hummingbird hovered right in front of me. She kept approaching closer to the point where I could have reached out and touched her, except I squinted my eyes in case she was planning on stabbing them out with her…
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Close Encounters of the Feathered Kind
This morning I was getting all National Geographic on my backyard, and this mocking bird starting shrieking and flying from tree top to rooftop. I assumed it was because the cat had come outside with me, and I started trying to snap its picture. A pair of hawks swooped overhead, so my theory about the cat shifted to the hawks. The mockingbird’s young must have been out and she was trying to protect them. She finally roosted (still shrieking) in a nearby magnolia and I got one blurred photo and was just about to get another when she took off and next thing I knew, she was screaming in my…
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Growing Habitat
The first time I saw a male cardinal perched in the peach tree I had planted in the back yard, I couldn’t help feeling a little light-hearted. I was actually so excited that for a moment I contemplated interrupting Joe at work to tell him there was a bird in my tree. What made me most excited was seeing that this tree, which I had planted to commemorate a baby lost to miscarriage, was no longer my tree. It had been adopted as part of the growing habitat in our back yard. Everything we do to the land on which we live shapes, alters and transforms habitats. When we took…
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Birds on the Deck
These are two birds that don’t usually come up onto the deck. I’ve never been able to get a picture of a blue jay this close. They tend to stay far from the house. Just in the past couple weeks, a pair has started visiting the feeders – but only if they don’t see any movement behind our windows. For being such bossy birds, they sure are skittish around people!
