Peony on

Robin, ants, peony.

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

There’s nothing particularly interesting about a robin. It’s probably the species of animal most overlapping my childhood in the Midwest and fatherhood in the PNW – though the ones here are much fatter than their eastern counterparts with some positively huge.

robin

There’s also nothing spectacular about this photo, in fact it’s not that great at all – but I spend a lot of time with this particular robin barking at me! It’s decided to nest in my rose arbor and is making it abundantly clear when I’m near the roses it is not happy.

Color, color everywhere ...

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

courtesy the flowers of summer.

pink peonies

peonies

peony

geraniums

yellow

bee on pink flower

Birds, flowers and ants.

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Birds

We accepted IslandWood’s invitation today for a bird walk, our first foray into proper birding with a guide, binoculars, book and camera. Actually arriving on-time for the 8 am start was accomplishment enough; had we not seen a bird at least the get-everyone-ready time trial resulted in victory.

Since it was pretty overcast and the Saturday walk saw few birds Mark, our guide, would instead focus on calls. As we walked through the woods he would call name after name of birds, which pretty quickly became a mess in my head. I could either remember the name of the bird or the call, but not both.