Category: Animals

Wildlife XII: A New Hope

This is the year that the wildlife camera just keeps on delivering. I just chuck it any old place in the backyard and it brings me back photo after photo of the menagerie that calls our backyard home. Here’s the latest batch:

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“Excuse me sir, do you have permission to photograph me?”

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“Ok partner I’m covering the camera you’re now safe to raid the bird feeder on the patio!”

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“I think I just heard the sound of a camera shutter?”

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“If we combine our powers maybe we can get into the house!”

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“I believe I can fly!”

As usual, the creepy night-time shots are my favourites. One of these day’s I’ll get Slenderman on one of these…

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That’s ‘the deer family’ that lives in our neighborhood. Of course there are many deer living here, but we always see this mom and baby around our house (including wobbling fawns when they were very young!). I guess the trees in our backyard are on their dinner tables.

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See his antlers? This is a much rarer sight, and the few times I’ve seen male deer with antlers during the day they have always been distance or skittish. I like the idea one of them was wandering around our backyard.

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OMG! That has to be one of the best shots yet, a raccoon selfie! Isn’t he adorable πŸ™‚

Still no foxes, moles or chipmunks. The search continues…

Wildlife XI: Return of the Robo Camera

This time I left the camera out for about 6 weeks, and it took a staggering 800+ photos. Incredibly the batteries still had 30% charge left after all this time (which included a series of extremely hot days). I’m really pleased with this camera overall.

Looking through all those photos for hidden gems was a bit of a drag though, since about 775 of them had nothing of much interest πŸ™‚

Let’s start with the squirrel shots for mum:

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Doing a quick tail comparison tells me the first and last shots are of different squirrels, which is entirely likely given the number of them living around here. The selfie shot is funny isn’t it?

You can see I switched the position of the camera after the first month. This was to catch a very particular target on film, but I’m sad to say I failed. I’ll try again though, and I’ll leave you in suspense as to what I’m after…

The rest of the shots were of the usual cats:

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Exactly two (consecutive) frames of a deer:

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A bunny:

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This creature I am having trouble identifying (but is most likely the fluffy white cat):

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And a few shots of possum bums (and no I’m not joking).

Still no foxes. Still no ground hogs. Still no wolves, bears or even bigfeet.

The search continues…

The Fair

Once again we visited the Duchess County Fair. It was great as usual, and here’s a list of ten things we saw:

1) Lots of rides! They were a little less dazzling after what we’d seen in Hamburg, but I still cursed my craven sense of balance that prevents me from riding them these days! 

 
2) Prize winning wheat! Nearby were sunflowers about 10 feet tall!

 
3) Delicious fair food, absolutely worth the incredibly inflated prices! $9 for a cob of corn and some lemonade? No problem πŸ˜‰

 
4) This amazing first-prize winner of the 7-10 year old ‘non kit’ Lego assembly contest. I kid you not, this was indeed the blue ribbon winner:

 
5) Some extremely sporty sheep! 

 
6) A legion of Minions! 

 
7) Fine, fine art: 

 
8) Porky the giant pig! Enough sausage for 1000 people! Two 100 pound hams! (No we didn’t enter to see what was probably a sleeping pig) 

 
9) A baby cow, born only minutes earlier: 

 
10) And last but not least many animals for KLS to feed. She was scared of the camel because of his teeth, but he turned out to be a gentle (slobbering) fellow πŸ™‚