Today’s post of new cats is at http://photos.tandlphotos.com/blog/2015/6/new-cats-in-town. On this date back in 2011 it was dry with smoke from fires darkening the skies and blotting out the sun. Today we got 1/3 of an inch of rain.

Originally posted June 14, 2011: The smoke was blowing in on my way home tonight and the sky looked interesting at the light at Alameda and 2nd Street, so I pulled off at the little ice house and got a photo of the cloudy, smoky sky with ice ads in the foreground. Laurie found a porcupine quill in Puck’s fur tonight. I’ll photograph it tomorrow, but this porcupine might end up being a problem. I thought the cats had enough sense not to mess with them, but maybe not. Their instinct to go after rodents, even though the rodents are three times larger and very prickly, might just be too much for their kitty sense. At least Puck’s kitty sense, apparently. He tries to be a tough cat, but messing with porcupines is a bit much. Then there are flies with major attitude, like the one pictured tonight. This fly was ready to take on the camera lens, or maybe its own reflection in the filter was getting it riled up, but it was ready to fight one way or the other.

Animal Daze (repost from 2011)

June 13, 2015June 12, 2015 Timothy Price13 Comments

Today’s blog is Peace and Panoramas at http://photos.tandlphotos.com/blog/2015/6/peace-and-panoramas. Back in 2011, I got a photo of the porcupine and a baby raccoon in the wee hours of the morning, and a daddy longlegs in my coffee filter.

Originally posted June 13, 2011: I got up at 4:30 am and went outside to play with my porcupine. I found it waddling down the road toward the ditch, but it didn’t want to play. It did stop for moment, gave me menacing look, giving me a chance to photograph it in the beam of my flashlight, before in slipped under a trailer on the other end of the property. I continued out to the ditch, screwed down the main gate to back up the water, then watched the bright eyes of a raccoon cross the ditch as I walked back into the yard.

Just after daybreak, I was building up the borders, when I heard a raccoon screeching and chirping by the trailer the porcupine crawled under earlier. I walked down to investigate, and found a baby coon stranded in the junk in front of the trailer, and the mama coon on the roof growling commands to it. The baby wasn’t really stranded, just confused in among all the junk.

I tried to coax it to come toward me, which would get it out of its quandary, but every time it started coming toward me, mama would growl, and the baby would stop. It was confused between me and its mama, but was finally a good kid, listened to it’s mama, and took refuge in an old milk crate. The baby was whimpering and crying so much the whole time we were talking to it, I was afraid it had tangled with the porcupine — I got close enough to it to see it didn’t have any quills, making mama throw a growling fit. It was just wet and muddy from following its mama around in the irrigation water.

After I shut down the water, I came into make coffee, and discovered a daddy long legs in my coffee filter — I had to photograph it, of course, before I coaxed it out of the filter, before I filled it with freshly ground coffee beans.

A humming bird was dive-bombing something, I couldn’t tell what, but then it took a long rest before it resumed its attack, allowing me to get a fairly decent view of it with a telephoto lens. I couple of bees were so involved in working a yellow daisy that my camera didn’t phase them at all.

Golden Unicorn

June 11, 2015June 10, 2015 Timothy Price18 Comments

My post for today is of an old bike in a bunker at http://photos.tandlphotos.com/blog/2015/6/bike-in-a-bunker. The kitty in the fourth photo is Puck. He disappeared in the summer of 2013.

Originally posted June 11, 2011: Golden Unicorn was in good form tonight. We are finally getting more decent blooms on the roses. The Chestnut Rose’s bud is very interesting with all it’s little spikes. I got a new dragonfly on Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick. The cotton under the trees behind the rake looks a lot like snow in the low sun. I did some more tightly cropped photos that made the cotton look even more like snow, but having the rake in the foreground was much more interesting.