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When I cropped this photo and zoomed in, I noticed a hole in the top of his beak - what's with that??? To see it, you may need to click the photo to enlarge.
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turkey vulture
My husband has been putting insulation under our house and he found this snake skin on the rafters. Glad it was only the skin...
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Here's a close up view...
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Our neighbors dock on a foggy morning - mallards on the left, geese on the right, and a great blue heron on the roof...
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These four are just finishing up their annual molt. A few white pin feathers are still visible on their heads.
gouldian finches
Thursday morning we took a walk with our neighbor and this boy followed us home. He wandered around our house to check things out, then wandered back up the road.
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Saturday afternoon we saw him lying in the handicapped parking spot of the fire station at the end of our road. I took a drive back up there take to him some dinner and water. One of the volunteer firemen was there and he told me that the dog had been hanging around there since Thursday. He (the fireman) didn't seem entirely happy about the food delivery (although they had fed him earlier that morning and had left a pail of water on the porch) and informed me that the dog couldn't live there. On the other hand, the dog was very happy with his new bowl of kibble. I told the fireman that I would call a woman who rescued strays and I headed home. When I got home I made the call, and got the reply "I don't do that anymore." Hmmm - such an adorable sweet dog. Well, somebody will probabaly take him home, I thought.
Saturday evening... getting cold...temps supposed to drop into the 30s during the night... return to the fire station, lift him (he's a lot heavier than a chihuahua) into the back of the car and bring him home to spend the night on a pillow in our garage.
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Sunday morning ... post his photo on the bulletin boards at Food Lion and Washburn's Marina and pass his photo around at church. Nope, nobody knows him.
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Sunday evening... where is he? Drive to the firestation... yep, he's there. Open the back door of my car and he hops in. Back to our garage.
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Monday morning ... place an ad in the paper. Monday evening, he's still here. No need to drive to the fire station tonight. Named him "Harold". Husband still says we can't keep him. Stay tuned.
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beagle
You never know what you'll find in our basement laundry room...
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Years ago, my very young nephew visited us at Lake Gaston for the first time. He knew how to swim, but swimming pools were more his thing and he was a bit trepidatious about swimming in the lake. He started firing off questions - "Are there sharks???", "What about rip-tide???", "Pirahnas???" Of course I answered, no, no, no, but now this photo shows up in the Lake Gaston Gazette:
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According to the wildlife expert that was called in to identify this 10-year old boy's catch of the day, it's a pacu fish, actually a cousin of the piranha.
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pacu fish
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This summer some raccoons began making nightly visits to our yard. They would polish off any of the uneaten food in our squirrel feeders along with anything else they could find, including the uneaten hamburgers accidentally left on the grill by my nephew one night.
It didn't take them long to discover the hummingbird feeders. I came out one morning to find all 3 feeders on the ground, with a couple of the little plastic yellow flowers ripped out. After that, I started taking the feeders inside each night. Twice I forgot, and both times I found all of them on the ground the next morning.
The problem with bringing the feeders in each night, was that I needed to put them back up each morning ... early! In midsummer, the hummers would arrive at about 5:45 looking for their morning sugar-fix. Usually I would drag myself up at 5:30 to put the feeders up, then crawl back into bed. If I overslept, the quiet, unobtrusive hummer peeping outside the screen was my alarm clock. As the daylight hours shortened, I was able to "sleep-in". By Labor Day, the hummers weren't arriving until almost 7am.
Well, now the season is over. It's been over a week since I've seen a hummingbird... I'll put up the feeders for a few more days, I'm just not bothering to get up at the crack of dawn to do it.
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hummingbird
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This restaurant is often our lunch or dinner stop whenever we're traveling from my parents' house to my sister's house - a half-way point between Binghamton & Saratoga Springs, NY. My sister went to college in Oneonta, so our family has been a fan of Brooks Chicken for over 25 years.
My sister's college roommate refused to eat there - not because she was a vegetarian or that the food wasn't delicious, but because of their sign. The neon figure of the chef chasing the chicken with a hatchet was just too much for her to handle.
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Brooks Chicken
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OK, it's just a tiny dead leaf, but when I walked into the aviary first thing in the morning, all blurry-eyed, and saw this on the floor, my first thought was "a dead baby bird". No, baby birds don't have tails.... Oh my God, it's a baby mouse! I have mice in the aviary!!! What a relief it was when I realized it was just a leaf!
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I learned today that Honeycomb has a talent for sudoku puzzles - my kind of bird!
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After solving the puzzle, she gets ready for a nap in her favorite "bed".
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society finches
