Not to be too terribly irreverent or anything, but they really do rule the household! (Oh, and only one of them is male!)
My family has a thing for big dogs. And, funny enough, this crew is actually smaller than some previous members of the West clan!
Meet Bandit:
Woke up this morning to the sounds of our cat gettin’ his brawl on…we went looking for him, cueing to the yowls…by the time we found him out in the midst of the “savannah” (read: the old overgrown orchard in our back yard), he was slinking away from the scene of the crime. Not too many minutes later, he appeared on the back doorstep…in the worst state I’ve ever seen him.
(FYI the following pictures were NOT taken this morning…just wanted to let you have a look at the big fella himself. This is a 17 pound animal we’re talking about here. Loves his hunting.)
Nasty gash on the back of his left ear, bleeding from a hole in his right ear, bleeding from a gash in his nose (right in the middle of that white stripe) bleeding from his left rear paw…came onto the back porch, shook his head like a boxer trying to clear his vision and splattered blood all over the tile floor…tufts of fur pulled out from various places on his left side…
He did let us compress his ear, and wipe off some of the blood…ate a few scoops of his favorite kibbles, and then went and curled up under a bed to sleep it off. We’re trying to find a bottle of Clavamox to stave off the near certain imminent infection(s).
Reminds me of one of the saddest IMAX presentations I’ve ever seen. When we were in Victoria BC earlier in the year, we went to see “ROAR: Lions of the Kalahari” (which, my comments here notwithstanding, is a very worthy film to see). The story line revolves around an older lion and his harem who has fought for squatting rights at a water hole in the desert. Over the course of the film, a young lion comes and challenges the old lion for rights to his water and his women. In the beginning, the old lion emerges from their scrapes victorious…but eventually, the young lion perseveres and drives him away, out into the desert to die.
I know it’s the way nature works, and I know that Monty is doing what God made him to do, but I do worry about him. He’s a good cat, even if he is an attitude with fur most of the time.
The vet says that if his wounds are on his face, ears or front (as opposed to his butt), that means that he was the winner. And I do wonder what condition the other cat is in.
But I still wish that our old lion would learn the ways of peace…somehow.
Perhaps my subtitle to this post should be “Rich discovers the macro feature on his long lens”. Life is in the details, so here are some things that perhaps you wouldn’t ordinarily see…or find interesting.
Let me state for the record: I hate yellow jackets. I know that God made them to have purpose in the world (read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_jacket if you don’t believe me), but that doesn’t change my general loathing of their hard little yellow and black bodies, not to mention their unfailing, terminally ornery dispositions. Ergh.
However. Look at this and tell me it’s not beautiful:
My little sister once made the mistake of taking pity on a wet bumble bee. “Poor bumble! . . . . . . OW! Momeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” She was younger then than she is now, but I’m sure she remembers that Ms. Bumble did not take kindly to being picked up.
This one caught my eye because of the contrast in colors. I have no idea what he/she is, but interesting looking anyways:
OK, maybe I could have left this one out…. Man, thing looks like an alien. I wonder what it will be when it grows up? Anyone know? Suzie my bug-ologist cousin?
We managed to abscond with most of the Asian lillies we had planted in Ann Arbor. Man are these awesome flowers! Powerful visually, powerful olfactorily (is that a word?)
And here endeth the lesson on macro photography. Heheh.
One of the views from the Arbor…see the hummingbird?
Ah, just kidding. There’s no hummingbird there. How long did you spend looking? 
And here are our Deer Friends. Just like Bambi…or something.
They sure are cute, though.
There is something about hummingbirds.
I can honestly say that until recently I had a couple of “was that a hummingbird?!” experiences under my belt in all the time I have spent out of doors these 35 years.
Well.
My parents sent a hummingbird feeder (probably last Christmas?) which we recently hung out in the arbor on the north side of the house. Actually, we hung it about a month ago, but I think it has taken the hummingbird community that long to come to terms with the bright blue bauble. Not that I can blame them…it doesn’t look much like a flower to me either. Well, now they’ve found it, and it takes them collectively no more than 3 days to drain it. We have become a veritable sugar water factory! Look out Coca Cola…
The arbor at is an idyllic space. It has half a dozen very happily flowering hanging plants, a border of lush, dark green, waist-high Boxwoods, two folding chairs, a small table, a stone bench, a floor of brick and crushed stone, and….a hoary old air conditioning unit sticking up out of the ground. Well, nothing’s perfect.
We hung the hummingbird feeder in the arbor and watched for quite some time. Finally, I spent a whole morning in the arbor with my camera and was rewarded for my patience with the delightful company of three of these diminutive creatures. Two males doing battle for this very valuable new territory (thus the title of this post) and a female. My favorite thing that I’ve discovered in these new companions: the anticipation of their arrival is as much the fun as the enjoyment of their company.
Something about these little birds lifts the spirit (even when they are batting at each other with their wings) and I’ll be confounded if I can explain just exactly why.
Here comes the first one to check out the scene. He makes a bee-line for the arbor from a quarter mile away, and your eye is drawn by the flash of speed. At the very end of his approach, as he slows to assess the situation, his wings make a “brrrrrr-rup” sound that you almost feel as much as hear.
As he hovers, he makes hardly any sound at all. Flits around, checks things out from several different angles. Tiny little vocalizations: “chitchit……….chit……..chit……….chitchit”
Then, blissful contact:
Once he’d had his first drink, he zoomed off to the neighboring crab apple tree to make sure that all was still safe:
Sorry it’s so blurry, but this is using my long lens and magnifying the results quite a bit. I was not using a tripod, and as good as my hands are (ahem) you still get some lens shake at that distance.
These next three images needed some adjustment and also a great deal of magnification. They were originally quite backlit…but I liked the effect so I included them.
Approach…
A little closer…
Contact!
And then, just as soon as they’d come, “brrrrrrrrrrrrroooooo” and they were gone, like little green and brown bullets, dwindling to nothing in the distance.
I hope you enjoyed these as much as I enjoyed taking them.
There’s something about hummingbirds…
Right, so remember on my last post I was telling my inner pessimist to shut up? About it snowing again? After that lovely string of 70 & 80 degree days we had? Frickin’ Michigan. I swear. Doggone it if he wasn’t right!
So, before the 8 inches of snow we got last weekend, I went out into Kensington Metropark and shot some photos of what is easily my favorite time of year. When the trees just start to green up……you look into a stand of trees, and there’s a lovely green haze…you can’t really see the leaves, but the buds are giving the forest world a light, bright green twinge. Very very nice.
Oh, and I’m making the images a bit smaller now. Hope you can still make them out enough to be interesting. Please do let me know what you think.
My favorite bird:
Love these tiny (more…)
