May 9, 2008

Friday Bird Blogging

I've posted before that the dark-eyed junco is my favorite mountain songbird. It's just one beautiful little bird. Their preferred habitat is what you see here, brushy areas on the highest mountaintops in the Smokies and Appalachia. In the winter when the high mountains are covered in ice and snow, they will come down to the valleys and often be seen at bird feeders. This image was taken on the Forney Ridge trail on Clingman's Dome. The rocks you see are the actual trail. When walking the high mountain trails in the warmer months, the rustling you hear in the brush is almost alway a junco. I've been trying to capture an image of one for years in their preferred habitat. I really like this pic.

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May 8, 2008

Looking Down on Spring

 

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May 7, 2008

Appalachian Trail

Way up high where it's still Winter.

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May 6, 2008

More Scenes from the Cove

 

The highest mountain in the second pic has snow or frost on it. It's still Wintertime in the high mountains.

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May 5, 2008

Site Maintenance

Sunday was another entire day of outages and limited access for my site. Today I will waste moving all my content to another host provider and getting it working over there. At some point the "nameservers" will move jimfletcherphotography.com and smokieslight.com to the new host. Chances of this operation going smoothly: 0%. If you ever set up a website, do not use ehostpros.com for your provider.

I hate computers.

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Scenes from the Cove

 

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May 4, 2008

All For One, One For All

These little musketeers flew the nest today for the first time. They are huddled against a retaining wall for the parking lot at my condo, with woods and brush high above where their nest apparently was. The parking lot and wall was not a hospitable place for the little ones, so I stayed with them at a distance for almost two hours, watching the parents tend to them and to warn any cars of their presence. No cars came along during that entire time, but it was a stressful time for the parents, the kids, and also myself, having to let nature take its course and hope for the best. More pics and story in the extended entry...

Continue reading "All For One, One For All"

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May 2, 2008

Florida

I've added a new gallery of Florida pics taken last Winter on the commercial site.

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Friday Bird Blogging

Never published this one taken last March at the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge.

Posted by fletch at 12:29 PM | Comments (0)

May 1, 2008

Nature Trail No. 4

The Place of a Thousand Drips is losing some or most of its magic. With the hemlocks dying off, it's more open and exposed to the sun now. Near the end of the trail I came across a small caravan of elves, trolls, and a couple of wizards mounted on unicorns headed out of the Park. They've come upon hard times with last year's drought, climate change, and the loss of cover in the dying forest. A few said they heard rumors of work out in Oregon or Washington state, a few others were headed south to Costa Rica, though none were too happy about their future prospects. One wizard said he was just gonna take a night audit job in Gatlinburg. At age 1000, he was getting too far along in years to make a major change.

And in the streets the children screamed,
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The church bells all were broken.
And the three men I admire most:
The father, son, and the holy ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.
-- Don McLean

Posted by fletch at 6:45 PM | Comments (3)