Carolina Wren

Deer Haven Preserve, Delaware, Ohio

Winter Photography

 Since I'm going to be heading up a free winter photography workshop on February 5th for the Delaware Preservation Parks, I thought I would ask here what winter photography problems, issues, or questions that you might have that might help guide my upcoming workshop.  I've thought a ton of things already, but I can't think of everything.  Please feel free to share any winter photography tips or questions with a comment.  Thanks!

Tom

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, Sphyrapicus varius

Deer Haven Preserve, Delaware County January 22, 2010

Bird Help!

 What is this little brown bird?  It was sitting on the ground, eating seed, at the Deer Haven Preserve in Delaware county.  It looks like a song sparrow, but it is smaller, has a much smaller bill, and a noticeably shorter tail.

The mystery bird is in the foreground- a typical song sparrow, for comparison, is in the background.

My guess, based on a quick perusal of Sibley's Guide, is a Lincoln's sparrow, but it's not quite a perfect match.    What do you think?

Tom

Winter Photography Workshop, February 5!

Otisfield, Maine 2010

Happy New Year!

Time, time, time....If only I had more of it.  As Weston grows, and as our family grows (we're expecting our second baby in early March), my life has grown increasingly complicated.  Megan and I are incredibly blessed.  But something has to give, and, I have come to the realization that I just can no longer keep this blog running as I have in the past at a several posts a week clip.  Don't worry- I'm not going anywhere, but things will just be considerably slower here as our family grows.

Worthington, Ohio, 2010

I wanted to let you know about an upcoming winter photography workshop that I'll be heading up.  It will be a 2 hour hands-on photography workshop for the Delaware Preservation Parks and the Deer Haven Preserve Lodge, Saturday February 5th from 2-4 p.m.  The topic will be winter photography- I'll show a few pictures, we'll go out and shoot the beautiful Deer Haven Preserve, and then we'll come back in and if people bring their laptops, we can go over postprocessing images.  This is a work in progress, but I hope it works and is successful, and perhaps it could be a recurring program.


My goal is to get you excited about photography in the winter- to get outside and take pictures! Let me know if you have any questions- the program is totally free- I hope to see you there.

Here's a schedule of all the Delaware Preservation Parks January-April programming.

Tom

Columbus, Ohio, 2009

A Wiggly New Year Earthworm

With yesterday's warm temperatures, I wanted to see if I could find any creepy crawlies around the Old Bur Oak, and this earthworm made the perfect photographic subject.  It felt great to get out my macro photography gear in the middle of the winter.

Tom

Sorghastrum nutans

Indian Grass!

It's not quite from today, but close- from Friday, again, taken on the Delaware Wildlife Area.

21 Months and Counting

Weston at 21+ Months plus little creative Photoshop work.

It's hard not to say that Weston looks like me- we both share a dark complexion and brown eyes, while Megan's eyes are hazel and her skin quite fair.  But when I look at this picture of Weston that I took last weekend- I can't stopped being reminded of Megan. Weston's mouth, his nose, it's all hers.  It's hard to believe that in about two and a half months, we'll be welcoming another human being into the world.

Tom

Mallard, Belted Kingfisher

I have been remiss to capture any photographs of Delaware County the past two workdays, so this evening, I'm posting two images that I captured on Sunday afternoon, just before I photographed the great blue heron.  This drake mallard was doing its best to swim upstream through a riffle on the opposite bank, while this female belted kingfisher was perched high above the river, ready to dive for a fish.

Ohio and the rest of the east is experiencing frigid temperatures.  A few years ago at this time, I was still able to photograph autumn meadowhawks, but now everything is absolutely frigid- we're headed for a low of 14 tonight. Stay warm!

Tom

Great Blue Heron

Yesterday afternoon I returned to my old stomping grounds- Kenney Park. I went there looking for deer, but didn't find any. This great blue heron made the short trip down High Street worth my time.

Tom

It's a Mast Year

Red Oak Acorns, November 2010,  Munroe Falls, Ohio

Not long after the start of this year's deer bow season in Ohio, which opened September 25, I started reading reports that Ohio was experiencing a "mast year".   For some reason(s) that are not entirely understood, some years, most every oak tree in a forest will produce a bumper crop of acorns, far more than normal. During a mast year event, the woods can just be littered with acorns.

But why is this event called a "mast year"?  A little searching through online dictionaries and I found the answer- this usage of the word "mast" most likely derives from an old English word that meant food.  So a mast year is when the woods is full of food, and in the case of this year's deer season, full of food for deer.  And that brings me back to the deer season.  The number of deer harvested during the early archery season was down- a fact attributed by many to the deer staying put in the woods and feasting on the bumper crop of acorns, instead  running out into fields and farmland to search for leftover corn and soybeans.  I'm not sure if I buy this argument, but I recently visited my parents house and experienced this "mast" event first hand.

"Mast"

 They're lucky enough to have a nice red oak in their backyard.  When I was growing up, I remember finding a few acorns underneath this tree- maybe five or six per year.  The gray squirrels got all the other ones. So I was absolutely shocked to see the pile that had formed at the base of this tree.  Granted- my dad had raked the acorns off the lawn and moved them all closer together, but what a bonanza of acorns.

Why does this happen?  The prevailing theory seems to go like this: In one year, if you flood the woods with many more acorns than the squirrels, deer, and other wildlife can eat, than there is an actual chance of getting some of those extra acorns to germinate and eventually become trees.  By in large though, from my brief research this morning, there is much that needs to be learned about this phenomenon.

My hand with "mast"

This morning I asked this question-  Is it just Ohio's oaks that are experiencing a mast year?  After a quick search for "mast year" at the newspaper article search topix.net, I found stories from Florida to Connecticut and New York to Chicago.  I can't make the argument that the phenomenon is happening across the eastern U.S.  Perhaps every year there are places that experience local mast events. Still, I was surprised to see so many articles.  Maybe something unusual is going on, or quite possibly, it could just be a coincidence.  Needless to say, my interest is definitely piqued- I'm starting to see a whole PhD dissertation developing in my brain.....

My question to you is- are you having a "mast year" in your neck of the woods?

Tom

Morning Sky

A simple image of this morning's sky with the sun trying to clear the low clouds in the east.  Have a great weekend.

-Tom

Welcome Winter

Do you know why I know it is winter?  Upon arriving at work this morning all our door locks were frozen!  We eventually got in- but not before I was seriously regretting leaving my gloves at home.  There's something about the first subzero temperatures that surprises me each winter, and this morning was no different.  I thought I didn't need gloves- and I was wrong.

Although my morning and evening commutes were draped with clouds, central Ohio was treated to a quite nice mid-day sunshine event.  As winter drags on, sunny scenes like this one will decrease as we plunge into the gray abyss that is winter here in Ohio.  It's hard to believe that this field will be warm and full of soybeans in only six months or so.

Tom

Nature in Manhattan

It isn't too difficult to capture a traditional nature photograph in Manhattan.  When I need a little dose of nature, I head to the northern section of Central Park.  There are quite a few forested areas, with giant native trees- These areas are mostly fenced and signs are posted letting park visitors know that these are natural areas.  While walking along "The Ravine" which eventually leads to this waterfall, I saw a Cooper's hawk, tufted titmice and chickadees, and a flock of about 20 white-throated sparrows.  Not bad for an island where most people live in tiny brick, concrete, and steel boxes stacked on top of each other.

Tom

West End Avenue & 96th Street

There's no place like Thanksgiving in New York City- and that's where Megan, Weston and I headed this past holiday weekend.  This was just a very quick trip- but there's nothing like spending a few days in Manhattan to make one appreciate the relative calm of a "little big" city like Columbus.

Tom

Cattails

Today in Delaware County, the stand of cattails that rim the pond behind our office caught my eye.  There isn't much more fun a kid can have than ripping into a cattail- I remember getting covered in the white fluff more than a few times  The fluff is a combination of tiny seeds and small silk like fibers that enable the seed to be spread by wind and water.  And they sure do get around- it's hard to find any semi-permanent bodies of water that don't have cattails rimming the edges.

In Ohio, we have three types of cattails.  The increasingly rare broad-leaf cattail is our native species.  There's also the narrow-leaved cattail, originally thought to be native to the Atlantic coast but now believed to have come to us from Europe.  And last but not least- there's a super aggressive form that appears to be a hybrid between the two species. Wherever you see a massive stand of nothing but cattails, it's most likely the hybrid.

And speaking of the east coast-  we'll be off for a few days for the long holiday weekend- Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Tom

Tattered Wings of an Autumn Meadowhawk

The tattered wings of an autumn meadowhawk, photographed today on the Delaware Widlife area. 

Over the past months, I have struggled to give direction to this blog.  The best blogs are focused and updated frequently, and those two qualities have been sorely missing here.  To get me back into the blogging mood, during the work week, I'm going to present one image each evening that represents a simple nature observation I made earlier in the day.  I expect that my 30 mile drive north into the farm country of central Ohio should give me plenty of material for this venture.

During today's lunch break, I encountered this tattered, autumn meadowhawk that has survived several significant frosts.   With snow in the forecast for the end of the week, this insect is not long for this world, but our 60 degree temperatures gave me something to be thankful for- the opportunity to photograph a dragonfly in late November.

Tom

Ready for Winter

All the leaves are down from our backyard bur oak- finally. We've spent the last four Sunday afternoons blowing, raking, and hauling leaves.

Tom

Back to Yellowstone

If you've been following me for a while, you'll remember my trip to Yellowstone this past June.  After I came back, I started a new job, so I didn't have much time to really pour through the images from our three night camping adventure.  I'm off from work today, so this morning I took a second look at the images from America's megafauna capital.

A series of images of this bison scratching its head caught my eye, and I started to work on this particular shot in Adobe Camera Raw. After playing around with several different ways of cropping the image, I saw a little black speck perched upon the dead log.

Ah ha!  A brown-headed cowbird hiding out right next to a bison.  How cool is that?  If you've studied birding or ecology in north America, one of the biggest stories told in the field is the eastward migration of the cowbirds as America's forests were cleared. Adapted to range with the bison of the American plains, the cowbirds didn't have time to raise a nest full of young, so they somehow learned to lay their eggs in other birds nests.  Quite an interesting strategy for sure.  But as we opened up the forests, they started laying eggs in the nests of species that hadn't learned to recognize the cowbird eggs, and, to make  a long story short, we've got plenty of cowbirds around these days.

So although I've seen cowbirds here in Ohio a thousand times, seeing them in the open plains of Yellowstone National Park, sitting right next to a bison, leads me to respect this species just a little more.  They didn't clear the forests of the east- we did!

Slough Creek Valley, Yellowstone National Park, frequented by hundreds, if not thousands, of Bison.

Backyard Mystery

This is what I found in our backyard underneath our giant bur oak this evening.  What can take down a crow in a suburban-within-the-beltway backyard in Worthington, Ohio?  Could a Cooper's hawk really take a crow?  Perhaps a great horned owl?  No carcass in sight- just two wings, some scattered feathers, and a smidgen of intestine.

Tom