Porcupine Promenade

We got out late last night for a walk under the stars after putting up our third sack of green chiles, making power bars, and doing various other chores that took up all of our daylight hours. A few hundred feet before the bridge that we use to cross the clearwater ditch, I saw what looked like a weed moving ahead of us. I shined my flashlight on it, and, as I suspected, it was Porky, a very large porcupine, waddling along on its way to cross the bridge ahead of us. I pulled out my phone to see if I could get a video, but by the time I got the phone convinced to take a video in the dark, Porky had crossed the bridged and headed down into the cottonwoods between the clearwater ditch and the irrigation ditch. I managed to get a short, 15 second video of Porky waddling into the undergrowth by a large cottonwood.  I assembled and arranged a short piece of music for Porky’s promenade.

The photos below are an assortment of critters and fall colors.

Ducks In A Row

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Following the ducks is a bit of “macro madness” — I found various interesting critters in the iris and roses. While I was out moving hoses to hook up drip systems, this female mallard hopped up on the neighbor’s wall. Then she hopped back down, and I could hear her making little quacking noises. When I looked over the wall, she was marching off with four ducklings in a row behind her.

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Macro Morning

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I got out my macro lens this morning and René and I started crawling around under squash leaves to get photos of a bee inside a squash blossom. The bee was pretty cute, but after several snaps it got tired of having a lens in its face and showed me a hefty pair of bee fangs. I can’t resist doing macro shots of damselflies and dragonflies. I sneak up on them until they fly, freeze in place and wait for them to come back (they often do), sneak up a little closer — they fly, I freeze, they come back — and the process continues until I either get the shots I want or they decide I’m too close and don’t come back.

Mama Manx has a cave in the cucumber patch where she lays on the cool mulch under the shade of the cucumber leaves. When one of us gets too close to the entrance of her cucumber cave, she darts out like a moray eel, chatters at us, then retreats back into her cave.

Puck is working on his memoirs, “Don’t Puck With Me”, and while he was taking a break he pestered Laurie for some attention while she was reading. Guildenstern was intently playing with clover under my chair while I sat on the deck enjoying the fine summer morning.

 

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