Moving the Cam

We’ve been getting pictures of the same deer and the same raccoons around here, so we decided to take one of our trail cams and try it out on some of the roads we walk on.  We picked spots where we see tracks of other animals.  Mainly deer, wolves and bobcats.  So far we’ve been happy with the pictures.
 

Night and day pictures of wolves.A bobcat and another wolf at a different spot.

And from yet another location, a small bear (not the best picture) and two different bucks.

Look at the strange set of antlers on this one.

At the cabin, it’s always nice to see the little doe and her fawns come by.  The dots are slowly fading away on little Spottie and Dottie.

And it wouldn’t be right to leave out the raccoon family.  They don’t have names, because I don’t like them and wish they’d find another place to hang out.

The Irresistibly Sweet Award

Drum roll please….!  Well, maybe not that dramatic, but Tammy over at Tammy’s Photography Spot has passed along this award to me.  Thank you Tammy!  I'm honored, happy to accept it and to pass it on to other sweet bloggers out there in Blogland.

The rules state that I have to tell you 7 things about me and then pass it on to 7 other fabulous bloggers!

1. I love being retired.  We retired in 2007 and I’m still amazed how fast the days go by.

2. Another hobby of mine is making miniature pincushions and selling them on Etsy. Never in a million years did I think so many people would like my little creations.

3. I like all things in nature, except for ticks, biting flies and mosquitoes.  Other things I don’t like.  Green peppers, liver, and lutefisk.

4. Things I do like, chocolate, wine, pasta, shrimp and pizza. 
5. I have two brothers that are married to two sisters.  They are the best sisters-in-law anyone could ever have.  The brothers are pretty darned good too!

6. I make lists…lots of lists.  Things to do, things to buy, birds and animals I’ve seen, things I should do, places I want to go to.  You get the picture.

7.  I’ve been blogging since 2005. It started as a way to let my family know what we were doing.  The biggest bonus to blogging is “meeting” so many great people out there that enjoy doing the same things I do.

The next step is to pass this on to 7 others I feel are worthy of the Irresistibly Sweet Award.  Well, I want to pass it along too all of you because I think all of you deserve it. 

I’m becoming a fan of August

Normally, August isn’t a favorite month of mine.  By now, I’m sick of summer, the bugs, humidity and heat.  But this year August has become the month of good eats!  Last week we went home for a few days.  Along the way we stopped at several roadside produce stands.  The first one was the best.  The seller had a nice table set up with the produce reasonably priced and it was all on the honor system.  See the jar on the left side of the table?  Just put your money in it, take change if need be and you’re good to go!  At this one we bought some fresh brown eggs ($1.25 a dozen!),  tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers.  A little closer to home we stopped at another favorite of ours and bought more of the same things plus some jalapeno peppers.  This is the kind of stuff you gotta eat until you get sick of it, because the season for super-fresh produce is way too short.  Get a load of these prices!  On the way back to the cabin we stopped at yet another roadside stand and got some sweet corn, zucchini and fixins for fresh salsa.

Another wonderful thing about August is blackberries and there’s a great crop of them this year.  Jim went out and picked a quart on Sunday.  We had some on our cereal and froze the rest.  Yesterday we decided to go check on another spot and we each picked a quart.  The mosquitoes were as bad as they get and even though I was wearing a layer of Deep Woods Off I had plenty of bites on my arms and legs.  Our tomatoes are getting close to being ripe, so we won’t need to beg the neighbors for some of theirs this year.  BLT’s anyone?  One more good thing about August is the following month is September!  Yeah!  Cooler weather, football, fall color, pumpkins, squash and all that wonderful comfort food.  Bring it on!

Linked up to Tammy's Photography Spot "Behind The Camera".  

Things you don’t see everyday

The first thing is this strange looking flower called Indian Pipe or Ghost Flower.  Last summer was the first time I ever saw them growing around here.  This summer they came up in different spots and I’m somewhat confused by that. They only last for a couple days, before turning black and drying up.  The next two things I saw from my little blind.  Even though the water is going down, there’s still a lot of action out there.  Thursday a green heron landed right out in front of me.  It was there to get some fish, frogs and whatever else they eat.  I saw it grab something out of the water, shake it around, dip it in the water and then finally swallow it whole.  All the time, I’m taking pictures of it and thinking it grabbed  a great big frog.  After looking at my pictures, I was really confused.  What kind of frog has such a long tail, I asked myself? This was really freaking me out, trying to determine what in the heck the little heron caught.  I ended up showing this picture to a friend and he knew right away, it was a baby muskrat.  Whew, that explains the long tail and the claws on its webbed feet, although we didn’t know muskrats were still out there.I’m guessing it got washed out of its nest (or den or whatever baby muskrat holes are called) when the pond drained. 

 

A couple days later in just about the same spot, I watched a turtle climb out of the water and there on it’s shell were a couple leeches.  Ewwww!It sat there long enough for the leeches to get all heated up and I’m assuming very uncomfortable.But it didn’t stay out in the sun very long and went back in the water, so the leeches didn’t dry out. I know for sure, if I were a turtle, I would NOT like having a couple leeches attached to my shell!  It’s really not very attractive. 

Taking the Good with the Bad

Some examples of what I’m talking about.  Rain can be good and bad.  This is what the pond looked like on Tuesday, after receiving more than 5 inches of rain in less than 12 hours.  This is what it looked like after all that water caused the hole in the damn to become even larger.  And then there’s good and bad animal sightings.  I showed you pictures of the little wolf pup we saw out on the road the other day.  Well… when I finally took the card out of the trail cam, I wasn’t happy to see this visitor.  Talk about posing for the camera!  This is an adult wolf and it’s the first time we’ve gotten a picture of one…and it’s right in front of the cabin! Getting back to the rain we received the other day.  We don’t have a rain gauge, but our friend Randy who lives only a couple miles away said his rain gauge that holds 5” was full!  All that rain is good for the lakes and groundwater, but not so good for the already bad roads around here.  There were washouts on main roads, secondary ones and on most of our favorite dirt roads too.Notice the butterfly on the sign.  I wonder if they’re attracted to the color of all the road closed signs?  Well, there’s plenty of them around.  This was on our road Tuesday night, but it’s open now. I sat in my blind this morning, not expecting to see a lot with so much of the water gone.  But I was wrong.   Fish, frogs and bugs are easy pickin’s for the herons and other birds.  The kingfisher stopped for a rest right in front of me!  Finally a decent picture of one of my favorite pond birds.  But the decoy isn’t looking so good anymore.  Poor thing, for all it’s been through in the past year, now it’s just another mud duck.  It was frozen in the pond last winter and this spring I saw an eagle pecking at the decoy’s head that was just showing through the snow.

A Movie for your Viewing Pleasure

I’m still learning about HD movies and YouTube.  I made a two minute video and it says it’ll take 363 minutes for it to upload.  What’s with that?  Until I get things figured out, I’ll stick to this kind or just regular Def movies.  This is a video I made on Picasa, using the pictures I took yesterday.  I added some captions and a little background music and I think it turned out pretty good. 

Cute little pup.