Seasonal photos

The problem I have with the change of seasons is the itch to document everything. That's what happens when you live with a camera in your pocket.

Now that winter is upon us, I've been snapping pictures of the new seasonal beauty around our house. Ready for a bunch of photos? Scroll down.

Red-shafted flicker. These are beautiful birds, but boy do they bear watching. In our last home, they tore holes in the side of the house so severely that we had to have the whole side replaced.

Sparkly grass.

Frosty leaves.

Fallen oak leaves on the snow.

Despite multiple snowfalls-and-melt-offs, the leaves of our nuclear strawberries never did turn color. It's kinda weird to see so much greenery under the snow.

Some pre-dawn color. The whole landscape was bathed in a pink glow.

One of those rare sunset "column" phenomena.

Fog at dusk.

Another fresh snowfall.

That's it so far on the transition between autumn and winter, but I'll keep snapping pictures since, after all, I live with a camera in my pocket.

Photos to make you go "Hmmmmm...."

Here are a couple of photos I came across that stopped me in my tracks. The first is a skeleton of a pregnant fruit bat:

In all the years I spent studying biology, I've never seen the skeleton of a pregnant bat.

Equally interesting is this photo from the surface Venus. I've never seen what that hot and mysterious planet looks like from the ground floor:

Just a couple of photos to make you go "Hmmmm......."

Haunted forest?

We have a small grove of black hawthorn trees in our pasture. The other day I was walking Mr. Darcy by the grove on a morning when the sun was trying to break through fog, and snapped this photo:

I mean honestly, doesn't it look like a grove from a haunted forest in a fairy tale? When the trees are in leaf, it's actually quite lovely....

Happy freezing New Year

It was spectacularly cold this morning - 6 below zero - but absolutely clear as a bell and breathtakingly beautiful.

A thin crescent moon preceded the sun in the east by an hour or so.

The pre-dawn was pearly and peaceful, frozen into immobility.

Everything had hoarfrost on it.  The weeds...

...the hay fork...

...bushes...

...wire fences...

...and every tree.

The rising sun looked like fire through the frozen pines...

...a spread a warm glow across the land.

As the sun rose higher, it backlit the trees behind the barn, turning the hoarfrost into diamonds.  Unbelievable.

A good day to chop wood, both for the immediate warmth and for the woodstove.

JJ, our feral half-blind sorta-crippled barn cat, got caught in a sunbeam and couldn't move for a couple of hours.

In the evening, there was pink alpinglow on the distant mountains...

...and then a spiffy sunset.

What a heck of a way to start the new year!

(Click on any of the photos to enlarge.  Some of them - like the pearly pre-dawn, the alpinglow, and the backlit pine with diamonds are best appreciated at a larger size.)

Pretty sunset

Walking in a winter wonderland

We had a blizzard here on Wednesday. It left us with about a foot of snow (and some drifts) and it's absolutely breathtakingly beautiful outside. Yesterday I walked to the end of our dirt road - 1 1/2 miles away - and back again. Come see the sights with me.

I'm always amazed at how snow turns the ordinary into the extraordinary.

This little tree is only about five feet high. The snow turned it into a veritable Charlie Brown Christmas tree.

Snow-covered sentinels, marching along the edge of the field. Click this one to enlarge - it's pretty neat.

Every single branch had its ornament of snow.

Fence corners were half-buried.

From far, far across the canyon, I spotted a herd of deer. I put the camera on maximum zoom and got this:

Here's the herd, cropped:

Back home, some Christmas lights on snow.

This morning dawned crystal-clear and very, very cold (about 2F). But the sun rising through the trees was incomparable.