Serengeti Day 2 Part 2

Posted on 2024/04/25 by Gunther

Ok, moving along here. Connie and Neil had a nice date night the other day at Applebee’s…they’ve got an outside patio and it was a nice day…and as it’s late April nice days are going to be few and far between going forward until October or so. And he wanted a burger…they’ve got this one with mushrooms, Swiss cheese and he adds bacon…and the sauce on the mushroom makes it nice and juicy…and they’ll actually cook it where it is still pink in the middle which is a bonus. 

Then last night he made some chicken curry and they’ll have leftovers from that today.

Connie’s off at physical therapy…again. She was having some back issues caused basically by some joint issues in her spine so the doc sent her to PT to get some exercises to strengthen the areas that are causing issues and alleviate the pain she’s having. Strangely enough…it turns out that most of the issues come from standing but if she’s wearing heels instead of flats it doesn’t happen much. While he’s unhappy that she’s having issues…for him her wearing heels is a plus…she dresses up for date night and for choir on Sunday’s and he likes that because he’s old fashioned and likes it when women dress attractively.

He got his new backpack in the other day and got both the old one and the new one properly configured for carrying stuff on their upcoming trip to Costa Rica and his follow on trip after that to Glacier National Park. They’re both looking forward to the trips for different reasons…he’s going in the jungle in Costa Rica for monkeys, sloths, and wildlife and she’s going fishing one day and hanging around the resort, pool, and hot tub the rest of the time. She’s going as a +1 on the photo workshop which means no photo stuff but she and the other +1s will eat meals with the group, and if she catches any fish the resort will cook them for dinner.

He’s also got a lost of settings changes from Africa…things that didn’t work as he wanted them to and some additional recommendations and ideas he’s going to implement for future outings…most of them are in the autofocus area with various options for quickly changing from one area to another and to use or disable subject detection. 

Ok, here are the shots from the rest of day 2.

Another Superb Starling…again with the stare down…what’s with that (like the weaver last time) from such little birds.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 6284 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

And a couple of panorama images from the tea break where he got the starling above and the weavers at the end of day 2 part 1.

20240401 Serengetti iPhone 4705.

20240401 Serengetti iPhone 4704.

Lion couple.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 3062 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

And here’s the group at the tea break…from left to right we have Ellison our driver/guide, Luann, Pakeo the second guide just basely visible, Amanda (the sole Sony shooter on the trip), David in the yellow shirt and then Steve, Andy (Neil’s roomie), and finally Steve and Rose our hosts/workshop leaders on the far right. They stopped most days for tea in mid to late morning at either one of the kopje formations or a tree…mostly the latter unless the drivers were able to verify that there weren’t any creatures in the rocks.

20240401 Serengetti iPhone 4701.

A kopje that didn’t make it into the panos above.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 6542 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Superb Starling with some nesting material…it was building up in the top of the tree.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 6515 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Male and then female Agama Lizards…we saw a bunch of these over the week.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 3554 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 3581 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Another of the many weaver species in the area…the one on the right was happily enjoying its grasshopper meal when the second (probably its mate) tried to steal it.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 3458 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 3484 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Lilac Breasted Roller.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 3813 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Juvenile giraffe and mother.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 3877 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 6587 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Coqui Francolin…yeah, it’s a strange name…duck sized bird 

20240401 Serengetti Z8 3931 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Black Winged Kite…some serious talons on this species.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 4176 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 4179 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Tawny Eagle.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 4131 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Ostrich.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 4049 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

I know it’s not the right color based on the name…but this is a Black Headed Heron…Neil thinks it’s got the same common ancestor as a Great Blue Heron as they’re really similar.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 4315 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Lion…cubs and mama…and dad too. This was really getting close to sunset…

20240401 Serengetti Z8 4685 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 4588 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 4405 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 5066 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 5016 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 4832 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Three of the four cubs.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 5467 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 5412 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

This wee one was really fascinated by mom’s tail.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 5322 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 5238 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Dad yawning. My…what big teeth you have dad.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 7257 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Closeup of a second yawn.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 7257 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2 2.

And all four cubs lined up to follow mom across the road at the kopje to another smaller rock pile. Ellison said that she had 6 cubs originally (assuming it’s the same pride which he thought it probably was based on location and recognizing the male)…so apparently 2 didn’t make it…about 1/3 to 1/2 of each litter doesn’t survive…and a lot of the ones that don’t are killed by Masai tribesmen. That tribe doesn’t eat wild game…only cattle…which they graze illegally on the park lands. The lions kill some of their cattle so the brave warriors seek out lion prides, make enough noise to drive the adults away and then slaughter any cubs they find. This practice has eliminated almost completely the lion population in the Ngorongoro Crater Conservation Area located adjacent to Serengeti National Park. At one of their tea stops a group of Masai tribesmen walked past a quarter mile or so away…our drivers reported them to park authorities at the end of the day…but they were all armed so the group ignored them and didn’t take photos as directed by Ellison and Pakeo. Steve/Rose were glad that they specified no cultural activities as part of the workshop package as that usually means a visit to a Masai village and neither they or any of the participants were interested in supporting a tribe that violates national park boundaries to graze domestic cattle and kills the offspring of predators the park was established to help protect.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 6932 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

You’ll see these cubs again in Day 3’s images…Steve is a cat guy so we came back to this pride the next morning.

Cyas.

Posted in Travel, Critters, Nature, WIldlife, Photography, Africa, Serengeti | Leave a comment

Serengeti Day 2 Part 1

Posted on 2024/04/22 by Gunther

Ok, I’ve changed my mind…Ima gonna post these by day and depending on how many images I have it might be in 2 parts…and I’ll try to post some every other day. Sorry about the somewhat overload of safari images…but I wanted to give you a nice selection of shots from Neil’s trip to peruse since he may or may not ever go there again. He’s contemplating doing another one in 2025 if Steve/Rose run trips to Botswana next year…it’s a different environment with far fewer lions, more likelihood of leopards, and some trips on the river to get those sorts of wildlife.

On the home front…nothing really new to report. Neil ordered himself the next size bigger camera backpack since with his newly arrived 180-600mm lens the smaller one isn’t big enough for it, the 600mm prime, and 2 bodies along with all the other assorted goodies. He’ll give the smaller one to Connie…that way she can help schlep some of his stuff to Costa Rica for him when they go there over the summer. 

It’s been pretty hot and humid the past few days so we’ve had the A/C running…we’re all hoping it dies off a bit so we can at least open up in the morning for part of the say…we all prefer open windows to closed ones but summer is rapidly coming and we’ll be stuck with full time A/C pretty soon. 

Anyways…on to images.

Hot air balloons and zebras at sunrise. Apparently the balloon industry is basically unregulated there and our drivers reported that many people are killed or injured every year in crashes.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 5844 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Nicely backlit zebra with rim light in its mane.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 1723 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Wildebeest at dawn.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 1695 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Closeup of one of the balloons with the burner ignited.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 1659 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Hyena.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 1594 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Backlit lioness…normally this would have been a throwaway since she is facing way…but the light on her was so nice I kept it anyway.

20240401 Serengetti iPhone 4683.

One of the better roads they were on.

20240401 Serengetti iPhone 4678.

The lioness’s mate.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 5972 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Then he looked at them and walked towards the vehicle…I’m unsure which of these two poses I like better.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 1850 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Tawny Eagle.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 1812 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Wildebeest you can actually see some detail in.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 6045 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Another shot of the same male lion above.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 5990 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

White Rumped Shrikes.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 2155 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Rufous Naped Lark.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 2127 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Hyena.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 1901 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Wildebeest and zebra herd…they gather together a lot apparently as we saw this sort of thing aplenty.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 6063 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Lilac Breasted Roller in flight.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 2220 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 2224 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 2225 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 2228 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 2239 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

And sticking the landing.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 2243 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Superb Starling…much more vividly colored than the black (to human eyes) starlings we have in the US.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 2199 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

But on the other hand…birds have eyes that see in ultraviolet and this is what our black (to human eyes) starlings look like to them.

Image

Pheasant Coucal.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 2566 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Singing Bushlark.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 2411 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Black Winged Lapwing.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 6137 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Lion propositioning his mate.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 3026 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Because they immediately went to this…third time in 40 minutes, she looks like “just get it over with already”…luckily for her it’s pretty quick. We actually stayed around an extra 20 minutes so the woman in the vehicle could get a video with sounds of the mating only (he roars)…the rest of us had to “be very quiet, we’re hunting wabbits”.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 6188 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Hartebeest up on a rock…they want to get higher to see potential predators on the way.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 2754 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

White Bellied Bustard…sort of a crane/hawk combo.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 2703 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 2608 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Speke’s Weaver…there are dozens of weaver varieties…Neil liked the “what the heck you lookin’ at” expression on its face.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 6433 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 6412 NEF DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Interesting things found on the internet (or rather in this case Neil’s reading material).

He was rereading James Michener’s Alaska recently and in one of the sections there was a description of some scientists who lived or awhile out on an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean…at one point one of them pulled a dog eared map of the Arctic Ocean out of her pocket and it was described as something she pulled out of a 1960something National Geographic. Neil immediately realized that his was a reference to the same map he used on one of his submarine deployments. Normally if one is going way north you get a special allotment of charts…but he ended up there on sort of an unscheduled thing so none of the normal “the ship is going to the Arctic” things happened…resulting in getting to the far north end of the most northern most chart they had on board. The skipper asked him how he was going to navigate in the absence of charts…one of the quartermasters on the ship found this same referenced map in the crews mess library and he showed the captain this chart. It revealed that the Arctic Ocean was generally speaking deep, flat, and devoid of seamounts. Adding in that even if they had charts of the far north area…that part of the world is always ice covered and hence impassable to surface ships…which meant that even official charts had few to no soundings of how deep the water was. Typically you’ll see a sounding on a chart every couple of inches which depending on the scale of the chart might be 10 to 100 miles apart…but one gets a generalized idea of how deep the water is and if there are any seamounts that a sounding ship happened to drive over. Arctic charts however…are essentially devoid of soundings, there may be a single line of them in some parts of the chart but since it’s ice covered all one can say is that sometime in the past some submarine of an unknown owner passed along that line. So…essentially no soundings are available on the charts and the depth sounder is disabled on deployment as it makes noise if you use it…so the ship just used a sheet of blank tracing paper and navigated on that until they eventually got back onto a chart they actually had on board.

Cyas.

Posted in Africa, Critters, Photography, Serengeti, Travel, WIldlife | Leave a comment

Serengeti Images 1

Posted on 2024/04/18 by Gunther

Not really much going new around the house so after a brief comment on the big news of the week I’ll get straight to the images.

Big news is…of course…the Trump trial up in NY. As I’ve stated before…more than once…we aren’t fans of the man in any way, shape or form…and he should not be elected in November…and the same holds true of the current President…he also should not be elected in November. Unfortunately…Neil’s idea that None of the Above should be on the ballot and if None wins there needs to be a new election and those people can’t run again…well, hasn’t taken root so we’ll be stuck with one of them.

I know he’s been pretty antagonistic to just about everybody involved…and he’s the one to blame for that. However…in some respects he does have a point. The trial is being held in a deeply blue, progressive area…where just about nobody likes him. And at least from the outside the judge and prosecutor seems to be trying to dismiss any person who might have the slightest idea that the charges need to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. So…his claims of a biased jury and judge have some merit although a lot of the judge’s statements probably have to do with the irresponsible and completely inappropriate comments he’s making on social media. Add in the fact that…based on what we’ve seen so far…making the charges felonies instead of misdemeanors because there was an underlying crime…well, that seems pretty farfetched to me since no other crime has been charged by either federal or state authorities, no indication of what that crime might be, and can the state even use a non existent federal crime to upgrade the charges. Seems to me that…either at trial or on appeal…the charges are likely to get downgraded to misdemeanors unless the jury simply acquits because the evidence doesn’t support felony convictions. 

My personal thought is that the man simply cannot get a fair trial in NYC and probably can’t get one just about any other place either. Every person in America has already made up their minds about the man…and I fear that hatred or worship of the man depending on your point of view will certainly influence your vote for conviction or not simply based on that and not any actual evidence (or lack thereof).

Ok, enough of that…let’s have some images. All of these are from the first day in the bush…either from the late morning drive over to their firs camp or the afternoon game drive.

Fair warning though…lots of images in this and subsequent posts on the trip.

Giraffe with some unknown bird the was feasting on the insects on it’s skin.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 4533 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Same giraffe from a wider angle…both of these were taken as we approached the camp in the late morning.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 4473 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Banded mongoose we saw in the morning…there are some better shots of them on a later day.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 4460 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

White Storks.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 0043 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Dark Chanting-Goshawk…one of the many raptor type birds we saw.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 0004 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

One of the many kopje (pronounced ko-pee with a long o) formations we found…they’re volcanic in origin but nobody knew why they were just randomly produced or whether the whole area was lava and erosion reduced most of them to dirt. They range from 10 to 125 feet high or so and from 50 yards to miles apart. They’re essentially a pile of rocks with a lot of nooks and crannies in them where a lot of wildlife makes their home to stay away from predators or to protect young. Known as Koppie in Afrikans language in South Africa.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 4650 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Rúppell’s Starling

20240401 Serengetti Z9 4629 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Yellow billed Oxpecker…this one is sitting on the back of a Cape buffalo. It’s a robin sized bird.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 4578 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

And the same bird down under pecking on insects…our driver Ellison said they pecked on sores and ate the blood coming out as well.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 0251 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Cape Buffalo

20240401 Serengetti Z8 0175 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Lilac Breasted Roller…prettiest bird we saw and we spent a lot of time trying (and eventually succeeding) in catching one in flight to better show off the plumage.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 0460 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Wildebeest…it’s in the antelope family. They sometimes walk in a long single file (we saw one that was probably 2 miles long) but most of the time they sort of lope/half trot along in a big herd and are found in company with zebras a lot.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 0349 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Zebra…they’re in the same general family as horses but you can’t ride them as their spines are too weak.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 0309 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Another giraffe.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 4774 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Warthog…didn’t get a whole lot of really good shots of these as I recall…but with 32,000 images to cull through there might be some better ones that I forgot.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 4750 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Giraffe pair in what’s known as High Key where the background is blown out…one of my few dalliances into artsy-fartsy images…but the sky was blown out anyway so this seemed like a good use of the shot. The horn looking things on a giraffe’s head are called Ossicones…fur covered bony spurs. They’re used for mating fights along with slamming their necks into the neck of their rivals.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 0554 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

This is actually the High Key version…they’re done in black and white vice color, but the above was the actual color in the sky that day so the B&W presentation is a bit different.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 0554 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2 2.

Different pair of giraffes.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 4917 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Pair of mated Secretary Birds…so named because of the feathers around the neck. Sort of a cross between a raptor and a crane in body style. First shot is the male (we think) who returned to the nest first with some nesting material.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 0604 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 0712 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Acacia trees…the prototypical Serengeti image…but there are actually some 50something kinds of acacia trees, many of which don’t have the stereotypical shape. That’s a termite mound in between them. The king and queen termites live about 50 years and the remainder of the colony is divided into 4 or 5 types…when the royalty dies the remaining ones abandon the mound in groups along with a type known as queens to be to establish new mounds. The abandoned one becomes home to other wildlife…mongoose being the most popular new residents.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 4937 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Our first elephant herd…this is the matriarch of the group…they consist of all females and juvenile males, the latter get kicked out at sexual maturity and are only around for mating purposes later on…males typically hang out in a males only herd. This female has a broken and malformed tusk.  We stopped our vehicles as the herd approached and the other vehicle was in front of us…the herd passed pretty close to both vehicles, within 20 feet in many cases…there were about 50ish in this herd which is basically a family group.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 4945 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

And one of the young’ins sprouting some tiny tusks already.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 5013 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Matriarch and her calf…one can clearly see her still nursing breasts just behind the left foreleg. This calf was a few months old according to Ellison

20240401 Serengetti Z9 5096 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 5117 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

White Rumped Shrike…probably a mated pair.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 0781 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Zebra herd…we went past this for about 5 minutes and it probably had 3000 or more animals in it.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 0972 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Black Winged Lapwing…again we spent a lot of time trying to get flight shots.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 0894 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Northern Shrike…very similar to the Northern Shrike we have in the US.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 5270 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Our first lioness…she and her cohorts in her pride were mostly wanting to sleep off dinner…except this one was probably nearing being in heat as the male showed up and was pretty possessive of her. Maybe 20 feet away.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 0989 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Hooded vultures…hanging out very near to the kill that resulted in sleepy lioness.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 5691 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 5625 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Hooded vulture and the remains of the zebra that was the lion’s previous meal…about 50 yards from where they were sleeping.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 5612 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

The male of the pricer…stereotypical pose at a distance and then a portrait from about 20 feet.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 1126 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Carefully eyeing us to make sure we weren’t a threat.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 1196 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

The hooded vulture in B&W.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 5691 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2 2.

Getting on to sunset with acacia trees.

20240401 Serengetti Z9 5754 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

The male from the previous shots about 30 minutes later…it was really getting dark…this shot was at 1/125 of a second at 840mm focal length…thank goodness for a beanbag on the truck to rest the camera on and 20 frames per second so that one of them would be in critical sharp focus. There’s a little blur on his tongue as it was the only thing moving…and you can see scars on his back from some previous altercation. After this shot they gave up and headed for camp as it was almost dark and ISO was getting ridiculous…this one was ISO 20,000 or so but luckily modern noise reduction software hugely helps with eliminating noise caused by the high ISO.

20240401 Serengetti Z8 1531 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

We caught the first of a bunch of really beautiful sunsets on the way home to camp…the actual sunset tonight wasn’t all that great but about 15 or 20 minutes later they caught a break in the clouds illuminated by the sun setting on the left about 90 degrees. Neil just happened to glance over and see this and yelled for the driver to stop for this 100mm or so focal length shot

20240401 Serengetti Z9 5792 NEF 20240402 DxO_DeepPRIMEXD2.

Just a couple of Interesting things found on the net for ya today…already a long post.

Southerners will appreciate this one.

PeeCans or Pecans.

And the longest place name in New Zealand…85 characters long…this is a hill there named Taumatawhakatangi­hangakoauauotamatea­turipukakapikimaunga­horonukupokaiwhen­uakitanatahu.

Cyas.

Posted in Africa, Critters, Photography, Serengeti, Travel, WIldlife | Leave a comment

I Bless The Rains Down in Africa

Posted on 2024/04/15 by Gunther

The reference to the Toto song from 1982 will be explained shortly.

First though…sorry for no post since mid March…but I gotta good excuse.

After our trip to Jax for the symphony we had a Sarasota Orchestra concert the following Sunday…they played Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin as the main piece…the soloist was a local woman who originally trained on the violin with one of the orchestra members but then changed to piano. She was pretty good…but had a very annoying habit Neil noticed on both the Gershwin and her encore. Normally…when a piece ends the soloist pauses for a second or two to let the reverb of the sound die out before bowing. This woman however…waited approximately zero nanoseconds after the last note before literally exploding from the piano seat to the front of the stage…I guess she just couldn’t wait to be applauded. She was pretty good as I said…and would have gotten applause aplenty but for goodness sakes woman…take a chill pill for a second or two. Neil had never…ever…ever…seen a soloist so eager for adulation and it was literally quite distracting. 

Following the concert…he spent the rest of that week preparing for a trip…packing and organizing last minute things…and starting his malaria prevention medicine. On Saturday he drove over to Miami and stayed at the Sheraton, left the car parked there and took their shuttle to the airport around 0800 to begin his marathon 30something hour flight via JFK and Amsterdam with a 3 hour layover at each before arriving in Arusha, Tanzania (near Mount Kilimanjaro) for the beginning of his long awaited Serengeti photo workshop. Along with 5 of his new friends…they headed or the hotel an hour away…all completely toasted…then arose the next morning to meet our workshop guides Steve and Rose Perry for breakfast before heading off to the Arusha airport to catch their flight to the bush…where they met our drivers Ellison and Pokea from Unique Safaris who actually do all the arrangements. Because of the overnight flights and the cost of the trip…and not wanting to waste the first day or two with jet lag…he sprung for business class tickets…and while he can confirm that the food is better, the drinks are included, and the seats lay flat so one can kinda sorta sleep…it’s still a bus with wings and he was still pretty tired. All of the other participants except his friend Luanne flew coach…she was in biz as well so they hung out in the lounge and had a snack between flights. Longest flight of the trip was from Amsterdam to Arusha…about 9.5 hours…and they actually flew fairly close (300 miles or so) to where the Houthi’s are launching missiles at ships in the Red Sea. They were well out of range though…but were still in the general area.

On arrival they headed to their first camp in the central Serengeti…accommodations were in tents but man, it was the fanciest tent he’s ever been in and definitely doesn’t really meet his definition of a tent although technically it did have canvas sides so it was a tent. They spent 4 days there with a morning and afternoon game drive…arising at 0445 daily and getting to bed about 2200 after sunset, return to camp, dinner, and charging batteries and offloading images from the memory cards…and actually had one day that the game drive went all day for 13.5 hours…by the time Rose suggested they return for lunch it was 1300 with an hour plus drive back to camp then eat and leave for the afternoon drive at 1500…so they voted to just stay out and eat some granola bars and skip lunch…although that did make for a long day but not really any longer than it would have been anyway.

He can also confirm that the roads are pretty gnarly in the Serengeti…I’ve got a video I’ll put up showing that but I gotta put it on YouTube first before I can embed it in the blog posts.

He came home with about 32,000 photos…and they all need culling and processing…I’l post the actual photos when he does that but for now I’ll just give you a little taste of the ones on his phone.

Despite having well over $200,000 in equipment on the trip…and taking well over 200,000 images in total between the 6 clients and two guides…he can also confirm that the cutest photo of the trip was taken…with an iPhone in the other truck. This cheetah cub climbed up on the spare tires and was looking into the back of the vehicle with a sort of ‘Mom, look what I found” expression on his face. They also have a lioness literally close enough to have been petted by Neil through the open window if he wanted…she was with her 4 cubs and also seemed more curious than anything else. This cub was literally 3 feet from us.

His first tent…pretty darned nice I say.

The lion cubs…and believe it or not the hyena cubs were actually cuter but he got regular camera images of them rather than iPhone…these are about 3-4 months old according to his driver Ellison.

Double rainbow taken the 2nd or 3rd morning…can’t remember which…looking the opposite direction from where they got the best lion portrait of the trip…at least it will be once it gets processed. That’s the other vehicle…driven by Pokea 

Another of the many lion prides they saw, a dozen strong with 1 male, 2 female and 9 younger offspring of assorted ages…somewhere over 50 lions total…this is about 1/2 a mile or so from the first camp.

Sunset on one of the drives.

Their ride to the bush.

The group on the bush plane…Andy (his roomie), Steve (hidden behind Andy), Rose and Steve in the back, David, his friend Luanne, and Amanda. David and Amanda were in his truck and the other three in the other truck with Rose and Steve alternating days so each truck got the benefit of Steve’s help and guidance on best shots. They rotated among the 3 rows of seats in the truck daily with the rear seat being the most uncomfortable. Despite that…Amanda took the rear row more than her share. She is too short to see over the roof when it was open and was able to stand on the rear seat and cooler to get a view from topside.

This is one of the better roads.

All that remains of a baby Thompson’s Gazelle after it became a meal for one of the predators (Amanda’s foot for size reference).

A couple of Acacia trees at sunset…these are the quintessential Africa trees but there are actually 30 or 40 different kinds of them.

As I said…he’s got 32,000 images or so and it will take him some time (weeks probably) to get them all processed but I’ll put up more posts as he finishes doing each day’s worth.

Cyas.

Posted in Africa, Photography, Travel, WIldlife | Leave a comment

Birds and Gators and Symphonies Oh My

Posted on 2024/03/18 by Gunther

Ok boys and girls…I know it’s been 2 weeks since the last post but we were out of town for a few days doing Fun Stuff© and now I got some updates and photos for ya.

Last Friday…well actually 2 Friday’s back since time flies when you’re having fun…we headed off to Titusville for a drive down Black Point Wildlife Drive at Merritt Island NWR to get some photos…then we stopped by the St. Augustine Alligator Farm since we had been told it was a good birding spot. Well…it wasn’t and that was a waste of $70 but we were on the way to Jacksonville anyway for a performance of the Saint Saèns Symphony 3 Organ which we’ve seen probably 50 times or more over the years all over the US and also beyond as Michael Barone from the NPR Radio Show Pipedreams would say. They headed home the next morning after Mass and got back midafternoon on Sunday. But I’ll get to all of that in a minute…let’s see what’s happening around the home front the past 2 weeks.

Connie’s choir at church performed a concert of Lenten Vespers…the director brought in a couple of professionals to augment and she got to sing both a solo as a soprano and also performed with the two professional singers as the mezzo soprano in a trio of soloists in a second piece. She was pretty darned good…not quite as good as the Soprano professional but then she’s really a true mezzo and not a soprano…so although she can get to the same high notes the true sopranos can her tone is slightly non bell like and more nuanced than a soprano…then there’s the 20 years of voice training she doesn’t have (she’s only got 4 or 5) and the “it’s their job so they better be better” thing to deal with. Neil took some videos of her performances and as soon as I can figger out how to get them up on his newfangled video enable WordPress site that hosts these ramblings Ima gonna put them up.

Neil continues to gather the last few things he needs for his trip to Tanzania…he leaves in 12 days and Connie will hold down the home front while he’s gone. He offered to take her but she said that she and lions don’t mix. He showed her a video on the platform formerly known as Twitter the other day of a lioness who just wanted a little love and jumped into the vehicle with the people. She didn’t eat them…so she either was curious or looking for some love I guess.
Here’s the link if you want to go and take a look at it. She’s going to Costa Rica with him over the summer…he’ll be in the woods taking photos and she’ll be fishing…but given her lack of interest in carnivores and death and the cost of going to Africa (you don’t want to know how much a 10 day trip over there costs with airfare, tips and all that) she said it wasn’t worth the expense for her. She’s happy with Costa Rica but turned down a trip to Glacier National Park a few weeks after Costa Rica for the same reason (although actually that’s a much cheaper trip and Neil sez the real problem is that the whole thing is up at 4,000 feet and there’s no air there…he’s willing to put up with breathing hard but she wasn’t. But…he did invite her to go along on both).

Then yesterday we had a Sarasota Symphony concert to attend so we were off to do that. After the concert…our original plan was to try eating at this chain named Twin Peaks…it’s a Hooter’s clone so you can guess what twin peaks they’re talking about…we usually eat at Longhorn up there after the concert as it’s near the freeway home but Twin Peaks is right across the road so we figured to try it and see if the food was good…it’s basically a sports bar with busty waitresses in skimpy but decently covered outfits…to have another option available. But then we realized it was St. Paddy’s Day and that the Hooters atmosphere sports bar would be a madhouse so we left that for next time and went to Longhorn which was pretty quiet…much more so than normal for a late Sunday afternoon. They had some wine, split a couple of appetizers and brought the leftover food home and had it with the leftover lamb roast he cooked on Saturday in the sous vide pot so it was tender and juicy and a wonderful medium rare. They had roasted potato wedges with it and he grilled a summer squash for her as well…then today it was the leftover veggies from Saturday, the lamb, more roasted garlic, and the leftover appetizer onion petals from yesterday.

And now you’re all caught up with doins’ down here. He’s gotta finish up their tax returns this week and send them off…all the paperwork is here and fortunately for him he can import all the buys and sales info from the various mutual funds their financial guys have them invested in rather than type in page after page of mind numbingly boring numbers. Import will save him at least 2 hours of typing and another 2 hours of the two of them verifying he typed in the right numbers.

Ok…back to our trip 2 weekends back. We stayed at our normal place in Titusville…the Extended Stay America…not because we need an extended stay but because the Durango Steak House is right across the parking lot. Since it was Friday in Lent…no meat for them so they had an order of fried calamari and then a couple bowls of she crab soup and then dessert before heading back to the room…long commute across the parking lot ya know. Early next morning it was off to Black Point with a stop at the Golden Arches for breakfast. They did the drive…which had some decent results…then since they had time they did the second drive down the beach road…and the only shots he got there were of the SpaceX launchpad where a rocket was scheduled to launch on Sunday…which it did. But no wildlife on the beach drive…he’s done it 3 times and gotten a couple of kingfisher shots and a couple of hawk shots so he’s not going to do that part again. Then they headed to St. Augustine for the aforementioned waste of money stop at the Alligator Farm…then battled their way through some sort of motorcycle festival traffic in downtown St. Augustine to get back to the freeway before arriving in mid afternoon at the Jacksonville Downtown Marriott…which is immediately across the street from the symphony hall where they had tickets. They rested a bit, then changed into decent clothes, had dinner at the J Bar downstairs in the hotel and about 1830 headed out to get to the symphony hall…unfortunately it had started raining like a mutha 15 minutes before they decided to head out. Luckily they had raincoats so they actually didn’t get very wet running 30 yards or so across the street…Connie wasn’t quite running but he’s rarely seen her move that fast in high heels. The symphony was wonderful…and it had mostly stopped raining by the time they headed back across the street and went into the J Bar for a nightcap…when in walked the composer of one of the pieces the orchestra has just performed…the world premier of the piece was the night before. It was her visual representations of the art collection of one of her friends…sort of like a modern day Pictures at an Exhibition if you’re familiar with that piece by Mussorgsky. We chatted with her for a few minutes before heading up to bed as we had gotten up at 0500 that morning and had an 0800 Mass 10 miles away to attend in the AM before heading home. The ride home was uneventful and he baked a pizza for her for dinner.

Here’s a picture of the organ…it’s a 6000something pipe one that used to be in a Baptist church someplace until it was torn down. The symphony hall bought it and paid for a 2 year restoration and then had it installed in the concert hall. We’ve heard the Organ Symphony with this orchestra and organ before back in 2010 or so but last time the conductor really held the organ back. The new guy…he’s pretty young…had a different idea…he thought that in a piece named the “Organ Symphony” that…well…the organ should be the star…and it was. It only plays in the 2nd and 4th movements…the second is almost always the slow romantic movement and in that one the organ plays mostly low notes…the kind you can feel vibrating your chest. Not too loud but quite nice. Then it becomes the star in the 4th movement…after the 3rd tails off into a quiet flute mostly ending the 4th starts with a massive C Major chord and the director and organist let her rip as they say. Quite an impressive finish…they went back across the street happy. The second picture is of the keyboard console…it sits right out on stage left. The pipe bank is the full width of what you can see from the display pipes and extends another 30 or so feet back for the remaining pipes. Please ignore the musicians warming up and walking across the stage…but you can’t take photos during the performance.

As you can see…the organist is facing away from the conductor who is out of frame to the right so she has a mirror strategically aligned to be able to see him.

Ok…on to photos from Black Point Drive and the few we got from the Alligator Farm at the end.

Little Blue Heron in breeding plumage…that’s the reddish neck and little spike feather on the back of his head.

20240309_Black Point_Z8_9638-NEF-_DxOXD2.

Tricolor or Louisiana Heron.

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z50_5544-NEF.

This is about 1/4 of the largest (by several orders of magnitude) gathering of Snowy Egrets we’ve ever seen. It’s mating season…and apparently this canal is where all the males hang out to fight over the females. We saw a half dozen fights while we were there. There are a few Great Egrets mixed in but the vast majority of this gaggle is Snowy’s.

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z9_3800-NEF.

And a close up of one of the boys in his “attract the ladies” finery.

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z9_3814-NEF.

Our next spot was this Roseate Spoonbill.

20240309_Black Point_Z8_9638-NEF-_DxOXD2.

Followed by this lone Snowy Egret with apparently something caught in its throat. It stood there for 5 minutes at least without ever moving or closing its bill.

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z8_9685-NEF.

Moving along…we spotted a whole group of Black Skimmers…so named because of their black head and the protruding red and black bill which they dip the lower half into the water to scoop up fish. One of the later shots actually has a catch. I left these deliberately as environmental shots rather than closeups because it was still pretty soon after sunrise and it was overcast so the light didn’t allow Neil a sufficiently high shutter speed to freeze the action as these are really quick birds…almost as quick as a Kingfisher except skimmers follow a more predictable trajectory so panning to keep them in the frame is easier. We haven’t had many opportunities to image this species in the past so between Neil and Connie they probably shot 400 frames…they add up quickly panning and shooting at 20 frames per second.

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z50_5556-NEF.

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z9_4063-NEF.

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z9_4032-NEF.

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z9_4330-NEF.

The other side of the road from the Skimmers we spotted a Reddish Egret but it was pretty far out and backlit so only one usable shot.

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z9_4390-NEF.

This is the SpaceX launchpad…the rocket scheduled for next day apparently hasn’t been erected yet as it sits on the far side of the pad.This and the remaining shots here were taken from the beach road drive.

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z8_9827-NEF.

Then in quick succession…a Red-Winged Blackbird, Tricolor Heron, Great Blue Heron, and another Red-Winged to finish off our drive. 

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z8_9813-NEF.

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z8_9749-NEF.

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z8_9728-NEF.

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z8_9723-NEF.

 Heading off to the waste of money Alligator Farm…the only shot really worth the money we spent was this Great Egret in breeding plumage…and it refused to turn around and show us something other than it’s back end.

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z8_9855-NEF.

We did get a shot of a *huge* crocodile as well as a couple of some of the Roseate Spoonbills. The problem was not a lack of birds…there were dozens to several hundred…the problem was that all of them were way up off the ground in tree based nests and there were just too many sticks, branches and what not to get decent photos.

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z8_9853-NEF.

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z8_9846-NEF.

This one was taking a bath I guess.

20240309-20240309_Black Point_Z8_9842-NEF.

And with that…the photo portion of the trip was complete so we headed off to Jax as noted above.

Interesting things found on the net.

All cooks can understand this one.

I wonder which one he brought home?

What you get when you buy a cheap airline ticket.

And finally…

Cyas.

Posted in Critters, Organ Symphony, Photography, Travel, WIldlife | Leave a comment

Neil Nailed It

Posted on 2024/03/04 by Gunther

I guess everybody’s seen the SCOTUS decision today that invalidated the Colorado (as well as the other two states that did so) court decision to kick the former president off of the ballot. 

Neil predicted weeks ago that that decision would be overturned and that he would not be surprised if it was unanimous…which it was. However…although all 9 voted to overturn the decision a majority of 5 found that any enforcement of the 14th amendment would need enabling legislation from Congress while the 3 liberals and Justice Coney Barrett wrote partially concurring opinions stating essentially that the majority opinion went too far.

He agrees with the idea that it went too far…but also he thinks that the partial concurrences didn’t go quite far enough. Generally…their disagreement was that the court usually decides only the decision in front of it and doesn’t expand beyond that…and that the majority opinion requiring congressional action to enforce was a step too far. His opinion is that if the former president had been convicted of insurrection then he needs to be kicked off the ballot but it would have to be a federal court decision to do so, not a state one. I know that all of the liberals claim that the 14 amendment is self executing and that it doesn’t say conviction is required. That is true…but it also doesn’t say that conviction is not required and elsewhere in the amendment it talks about due process…and due process means a trial by a jury of your peers. The problem is that whether the man is guilty of insurrection is purely and simply unknown at this point…at least from a legal standpoint. Sure…his supporters say he’s not and his detractors say he is…but none of that matters. Until a jury finds that he is guilty of the crime of insurrection beyond a reasonable doubt then by definition in US jurisprudence he is innocent until proven guilty. Frankly…I think he probably should have been charged and then let the justice system sort that out once and for all…but the DoJ chose not to indict and prosecute him for insurrection…and there’s really only a couple of good reasons for that…because they either didn’t have sufficient evidence to get a conviction or they were not sure enough that the thought of an acquittal was not something they wanted to allow the possibility of…take your pick. But absent a jury decision…all of the talking heads and partisan morons on both sides who opine on whether he did or didn’t…are just irrelevant.

And he’s actually surprised that even the liberal justices concurred that a state cannot kick a person off the federal ballot…he was pretty sure that at least one of them would agree that a state could do so. 

What’s really surprising is the internet rangers commenting…with their detailed legal knowledge, degrees, and experience…that he participated in the insurrection. While…and I agree…arguably, it is true that he did participate in one…one can also make the counter argument that the man truly believes that the election was stolen (we don’t agree with that, but I digress)…and both sides on both of those questions can point out talking heads and legal pundits and whatnot that ‘prove’ their point. And the anti former president people talk about the 14th amendment being ‘self executing’ because it doesn’t require a conviction…but then it doesn’t *not* require a conviction either leaving the question open and in the earlier sections it does specify that there is “no deprivation of life, liberty, or property” without due process. And while I agree that one can make valid arguments both ways regarding his participation…due process means (at least in the US) a trial by a jury of your peers and evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Without an *actual jury trial*  to evaluate the evidence and determine if the legal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt is met…then the principle of *innocent until proven guilty* applies and at this point unless I’ve seen whatever actual evidence exists in person as a member of the jury and examined the minutia in the law regarding the elements of the offense and all that…making a blanket statement that he did…or did not…participate in an insurrection is simply impossible. Without delving too deeply in to the evidence which I haven’t seen…if the man truly believes that the election was stolen then disrupting the electoral college vote counting could be considered as following the law to protest the election as unjust. I’m not saying it was unjust or not…and so far I’ve seen exactly zero evidence that it was unjust or stolen…but then I haven’t seen all of the evidence at all…just that “because I say so” doesn’t make it an established legal fact. And the judgement of a single state judge in Colorado doesn’t make it a fact either. And the fact that of the 7 justices in the Colorado Supreme Court…all appointed by Democrats I believe…3 of them disagreed that the court had the power to eliminate him from the ballot does’t make it true either. Simply put…as the SCOTUS said…this is a *federal* election…and while states are charged in the constitution with running elections they do not have the power to eliminate candidates from a federal ballot. This was clearly the common sense and ‘read the constitution’ answer all along…so I guess that makes Neil, Connie and myself eligible to be appointed to the SCOTUS…not that it will ever happen since whoever is doing the nomination and counting the votes in the Senate is more interested in getting a Justice who will vote the way they like rather than them following the law…and both parties are equally guilty of that demand.

His next prediction is regarding his claims of presidential immunity. The lower court provided a pretty blanket denial of any immunity for any president after he/she leaves office…and the court in their announcement to hear the appeal said that there was some question as to the amount of immunity a former president has. His opinion is that immunity for official acts will remain in place but immunity for unofficial acts while it does exist while he is in office unless he is impeached and convicted/removed from office but that a former president can be prosecuted for unofficial acts…and that any actions he took regarding the election in 2020 will be held to be candidate acts and not official acts. We’ll see what happens later on. 

Hopefully…after their oral arguments in April they will issue a decision relatively expeditiously and if they rule against him the trials can start. Unfortunately…if not and he wins the election…then after inauguration he will direct the DoJ to drop all federal charges against him. That won’t help with the state charges of course…and while the DoJ has an unwritten policy not to charge a sitting president it isn’t an official policy and states have zero policy about prosecuting a sitting president.

It’s gonna be a mess though. Personally…he thinks neither the former president or the President should be on the ballot this year for a variety of reasons (more than one each)…but it’s gonna be what it’s gonna be. And he thinks that both of them should take a cognitive test and it would show that neither is fit for the job…but then there’s that whole pesky constitution thing that establishes the requirements to be the President and “take a cognitive test” isn’t on there. So…much like the effort to force term limits on the SCOTUS justices or force them to follow a congressionally approved ethics policy…Ima guessing it just ain’t happening.

One other interesting article in the
news…up in Philadelphia Saturday morning a state trooper pulled over a car for expired registration and several other moving violations which may or may not be subject to the officer’s interpretation. The vehicle stopped and then a second vehicle pulled up behind the troopers car. Turns out that the first car was being driven by the Executive Director of the Office of LBGTQ Affairs and the second was driven by her husband. We’ve only seen the woman’s Facebook video at this point and not the dashcam footage…but the trooper (according to the report) approached the second vehicle after telling the driver of the first one to remain in their vehicle. He then told the driver of the second one that he was interfering with a traffic stop and ordered him (legally) to move on and depart the area. The husband declined to do so, argued with the trooper, and exited his car…at which point the trooper told him he was under arrest for obstruction. A scuffle ensued and the trooper took the man to the ground and cuffed him…all while being recorded by the woman who…in violation of lawful orders…had exited her vehicle and was filming the interaction (the exit was unlawful, the recording was lawful). She kept yelling “dat my husband” and “I work for the mayor” and “this is because we’re black” to which the officer responded “No, it isn’t”…as if any of those gives her a pass to have expired registration on her vehicle. She ended up arrested as well…and charges are currently pending results of a complete investigation and evaluation of the dashcam video. The mayor however…was quick to respond ““A video circulating on social media that depicts a portion of the incident is very concerning to me,” rather than saying something like let’s get the facts and see what happens. Obviously the mayor took the side automatically of her employee rather than having an investigation. And naturally…the liberals are all in a tizzy about this one…and if the end result is that the charges are justified by the investigation I don’t think we’ll see national media reporting that tidbit.

Now…Ima only a bear and don’t drive…but I asked Neil and he told me that way back when he was 16 years old and got his license he learned a couple of things about a traffic stop…if they ask if you know why they stopped you the answer is no, say yes sir and no sir (or ma’am as appropriate), don’t argue, don’t get out of your car unless directed, tell them if you have a concealed carry license and are armed, don’t do anything threatening, and accept your ticket. If you think the ticket is unjustified…then go to court and present your case to the judge. This whole idea can best be illustrated by
this Chris Rock video (but I warn you…it’s got some adult language in it)…while his comedy was directed towards black drivers stopped by the police…it’s right on the money. It’s quite topical…but I wonder if today’s comics (the video was made in 2007) would make the same video today or if it would be censored by assorted media organizations. As a matter of fact…if you’re innocent of the thing you get the ticket for…you can get it dismissed. Neil has personal experience with this regarding a parking ticket he got in the Washington Navy Yard while getting his Navy retirement physical…despite having an appointment and proceeding directly to the second floor as he was directed…he missed the sign at the first floor desk (which he was told to ignore) that said to get a parking pass from them. The ticket was issued by Washington DC police despite being on federal property at the Navy Yard and while it took him 3 tries including 2 letters to the mayor of DC…he did eventually get it dismissed since he had proof he was there for official business.

Let’s see…what else is happening.

Answer…not much. They had date night and bingo and that’s about it…and have a concert to attend coming up this weekend.

He did get out and get me some pictures of a new…well, at least new to being around our pond…creature the other day…a raccoon. Those critters usually only come out at night but he looked out the other day and there was one sitting on the ground by a tree out back on our side of the pond. He snuck out to get some photos and…naturally…it ran up the tree where it couldn’t be seen. But…being smarter than the average bear (see what I did there)…he just sat on the lanai with the door propped open to give himself a sort of blind that he could stick the lens out the door and shoot in between things. And sure enough…10 minutes or so later down the tree the li’l rascal came and he got these nice shots from 30 feet or so.

It seemed a bit skittish but once he cracked the doors and shot through the gap it couldn’t really see him so remained relatively calm although it did keep a close eye on him.

Eating something it caught here…

Giving Neil the evil eye stare down look…

And finally wandered on off down the bank of the pond…guess it was looking for more food.

He’s starting to get psyched for his trip to Tanzania…just a few weeks to go. And he did order himself…another…telephoto zoom lens (they’re like chocolate, you can never have too many) but it’s on backorder and likely won’t be here for this trip…but mebbe for Costa Rica in the summer it will be.

Interesting things found on the net.

Who wore it better?

Password requirements.

What do the red area and blue areas have in common…think on it and I’ll let you know later.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

The answer is that the red area contains 5% of the world’s total population…and amazingly enough the blue areas together also contain 5% of the world’s total population.

Cyas.

Posted in Critters, Homebody, Photography, Reality Based Blogging | Leave a comment

Finally…He Got Out And Got Me Some Pictures

Posted on 2024/02/26 by Gunther

Yeah…he’s been kinda sorta…well, let me think on the right word…been a slacker, yeah, that’s it.

Anyways…3 weeks with no post but then hey, nothing much has been happening.

Connie finished preparing for and sang in the first two of her concerts of the Lord Nelson Mass…which although it’s named after Horatio Nelson has nothing to do with him other then it was published around the time of his death. It was a pretty good concert…and she sang it again a couple days later. But then the third performance was on Friday evening over on Sanibel Island and she didn’t feel well so she stayed home…which was fine with Neil as he wasn’t really looking forward to battling his way through rush hour traffic and paying the 6 bucks toll for the bridge over there. So they stayed home and had some linguini with cheese, pecans, and pine nuts instead and all was good. She was bummed that she didn’t get to sing it the third time…but happy to stay home since she was not feeling well that day.

We went to the Elks for Valentine’s Day dinner…had excellent steaks and baked taters and some wine.

They drove up to Orlando for their TSA Global Entry interview…that designation lets you get into a different sorta slightly better security line. Drove up…did the interview and got approved, and drove back home. 

And that’s about it for the home front for the time since my last post. 

One interesting thing of note…I’m sure that almost everybody that reads this blog has been to at least one concert where string instruments were featured or at the very least has actually seen a violin. And you’ll likely remember that they’re pretty much universally a brownish color based on staining of the wood that makes up the body. Well…we sen one at her concert that we’ve never seen before. I’m sorry about the lousy photo below…but Neil took it from his seat in row 9 or 10 with his iPhone 15 Pro Max and while it’s good camera, this was zoomed in pretty far. The one in question is on the left seat in the photo and the more traditional wood violin (actually it’s a viola which is sort of like an alto violin) on the right chair.

He couldn’t really decide what it was…but as best as he can figure out it looks like it is made out of carbon fiber instead of wood…and he’s (a) never heard of this being  done and (b) even if it is done he’s amazed that a professional musician playing in a professional orchestra would have it instead of the more traditional instrument. Anyways…he thought it was pretty unusual and got me a shot to post here.

Lent started…which means we can’t eat meat (defined as warm blooded animals or fowl) for the season…and we’re pretty much fine with that. We like seafood anyway so it’s really not a hardship for us at all. Back in the day when this requirement was first dreamed up by the Catholic Church…not eating meat meant fish…and fish meant in those days dried fish, which Neil can tell you is pretty unappetizing. However…here in the 21st century…we have shrimp, crab, halibut, oysters, and many other quite tasty non meat alternatives so we just go with those. Interestingly enough…there’s one animal that’s been officially defined by the Vatican as being a fish from back in 1784. Since the PRC (People’s Republic of Californiastan) classified bees as fish back in 2023 I guess it’s not the first time strange things have happened.

There’s this rodent called a capybara…it’s a giant rodent sort of like a nutria or beaver that lives (mostly) in South America. Back when…the catholics in that continent petition the pope and actually got it approved as a ‘fish’ since it lives in the water. We’ve never eaten one…but Ima guessing it tastes like chicken. Here’s a picture of one…I gotta admit it’s the strangest fish I ever saw since it’s got fur rather than scales. I dunno…whaddya think?

You can also eat beavers on Friday during Lent…but we don’t have any of those here in FL to try so we’ll just stick to shrimp and lobster and calamari I guess.

OK, as I noted in a previous post (well, at least I thought I did but reviewing previous posts…apparently not…but I digress) Nikon came out with version 2.0 of the firmware for Neil’s Z8 body and a month or so earlier came out with version 4.1.0 for the Z9. He dutifully upgraded to these and while I won’t bore you with all of the goodies contained therein…there are a couple of really neat autofocus improvements…one is the addition of bird recognition and particularly bird eye recognition as a subject to be focused on and the Z8 has a mode to more rapidly shift between a selected group of autofocus options. The Z9 doesn’t have the latter yet but does have the former and I’m sure the latter will come along with the next update out of the Z9 team. 

These new options will make his upcoming trip to Tanzania late next month easier to get focus on the animals he’ll see and required some rejiggering of the functions assigned to the various buttons on his bodies. And since he’s not really all that good at remembering two different sets of ‘what do the buttons do’…he reprogrammed both the Z8 ad the Z9 to be as consistent as he could get them. And since that was a bunch of new stuff…he needed to go and check out whether he liked the new changes or where they needed re-rejiggering.

So…last week he went up to Fort DeSoto State Park near St Pete to check things out. And long story short…he likes the new configurations just fine.

But the good news is that he came home with about 1200 frames of assorted birds and I’ve whittled them down to 20ish to post for ya here. The biggest reason for DeSoto is the it’s the prime spot in the area for Reddish Egrets…and they have about the nicest mating plumage of any of the birds down here in addition to the coolest hunting technique…this usually involve them raising their wings and making a sort of shade. I’m not sure whether this is to entice the fish into the shade or to make it easier to see past the reflections on the surface…but they’re the only bird that we know of that uses this technique. So…here are some photos, and there’s a couple of interesting sequences and a relatively rare species down here as well.

Reddish Egret. Note the red hue on the neck and now that it’s breeding season they also get pink on the bill. Reddish’s are about the same size as a Great Blue Heron…they’re about 30 inches tall. There is also a slightly different version known as the White Morph Reddish Egret which is totally white (as are the juveniles) but retains the black legs and pink and black bill…the White Morph has been seen infrequently at DeSoto but Neil hasn’t spotted one yet. The pink in the bill gets a lot more pronounced later in the breeding season…gotta attract the ladies ya know.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_8440-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

Seagull.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_8688-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

He couldn’t decide what this shore bird is…best guess is a Red Knot but it’s hard to really be sure.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_8193-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

Mottled Duck…he was hanging out in the tidal pool with the Reddish.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_8187-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD-2.

Here is a quick sequence of the reddish striking and eating a fish…probably 2-3 seconds between strike and swallow. Fortunately…20 frames per second let him pick the best ones from the sequence for you…and you can see the unique feeding behavior in the first shot though they close their wings down as they strike.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_8730-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_8832-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_8833-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_8921-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

A few more shots…he saw two individuals of the species but the second was a juvenile and didn’t hang around long.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_8612-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_9136-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

He really liked this one since you can see the light through the wings as it landed. The juvenile buzzed it and this one went over to the beach in the background then flew back out to feed again once the juvenile left.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_9064-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

And another successful catch.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_9177-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

He then headed off to where the owls were nesting but on the way spotted this Osprey with breakfast up on a power pole.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_9221-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

He got over to the area near the boat ramp and ferry landing where one of his forum buddies who lives in the area told him about the nesting Great Horned Owls…but before he got to the base of their tree he spotted another pair of Osprey in some sort of tussle. While it wasn’t clear…he thinks that the one with the fish was trying to drive the other one off of a nesting area so that it could take over. Ospreys have particularly bad nest building skills and thus a lot of nesting platforms have been put in place for them and I guess they’re prime spots that latecomers want to steal. Again…this was a whole sequence that took about 20 seconds or so…and he missed the original approach of the intruder who practically hit the original occupant as it passed…and it never let go of the fish in its talons.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_9383-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_9384-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_9386-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

And naturally the original owner did its best to drive off the intruder and returned to the nest in 10 seconds or less…but he missed focus on the landing despite the autofocus in the camera so no shot of that for you.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_9392-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_9393-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

Just a few feet further down the parking lot he came to the nest of the Great Horned Owls. There are two owlets in the nest, they’re about 50 days or so old I guess here so basically full grown except all of their flight feathers haven’t come in and they haven’t fledged yet (i.e., that is taken their first flight). Here are two versions of the same shot…he upscaled the second one but in reality the range to the nest was probably 40 feet so upscaling didn’t really improve the results. However…he wanted to post both and see if you the readers can spot any differences in sharpness.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_9449-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD.

DxO_DeepPRIMEXD_20240222_Fort DeSoto_Z8_9449-NEF_DxO_DeepPRIMEXD-2.

All in all…a good day was had and he and Connie have a trip early next month for a quick weekend trip to Titusville for Black Point Wildlife Drive, the St. Augustine Alligator Farm and a Saint Séans Organ Symphony 3 concert…they’re really looking forward to that.

Here are a couple of shots from the pond out back over the last 3 weeks.

Osprey with breakfast.

Little Blue Heron in breeding colors…the red on the neck is about as fancy as they get.

And one of our resident GBH (Great Blue Heron)

Interesting things found on the net.

We see a lot of media rubbish these days about chemicals in our food and how evil corporations are poisoning us…and how we should eat ‘natural’ foods instead. Well…here’s a look at what it actually in one of those natural foods, the standard banana. Seems like it’s got a whole lot of chemicals in it as well.

image

 

And another thing you might believe from the news…that climate change and ice melting is a new phenomenon and is caused 100% entirely by the actions of people…but maybe not so much. As you can see
here…a recent study published by the University of Cambridge shows that about 8,000 years ago, near the *end* of the last Ice Age…there was a serious melting of the ice sheet in Antarctica resulting in it’s thickness thinning by 450 meters (or 1400+ feet) in a 200 year period. Now I’m not going to claim that human activity has nothing to do with our current warming trend…but this one happened well before there were many humans in existence and it just might be that the climate warriors are just a little overzealous in their claims.

And once again…I really have to wonder about math nerds…because (a) who would actually try and figure this out and (b) it doesn’t have any actual meaning whatsoever.

The string of digits ‘79873884′ occurs 4 times in the first 200 millions digits of π, but the second time it does, it occurs starting exactly at position 79873884, counting from the first digit after the decimal point.

Ok…so what.

In other math nerdery…the letter ‘a’ does not appear in any number as spelled out until we get to the spelling of 1,000…and the letter ‘b’ does not appear until we get to the spelling of a billion. While these statements are inarguably correct…they’re again completely meaningless in the first place and why in the world would somebody sit down to figure things like this out. Math people need to get a life.

And in the ultimate math nerdery (for today at least)…and again I’m not sure why this is important for any reason to anybody…our long national nightmare is over and math people have finally figured out the equation to describe the shape of…you guessed it (or more likely you didn’t guess it)…a bird’s egg. A couple of researchers at Kent University in the UK…Darren Griffin (Professor of Genetics) and Dr. Michael Romanov (Visiting Researcher)…have (their words) found the universal formula for the shape of a bird’s egg and this will make widespread biological and technical applications possible. This new universal mathematical formula for egg shape is based on four parameters: egg length, maximum breadth, shift of the vertical axis, and the diameter at one quarter of the egg length.

Yeah…so?

And about the US military…another fun fact.

The US Air Force is the world’s largest air force. 

The US navy is the second world’s largest air force.

The US navy has also its own army which in turn has its own air force. The US Marine Corps Aviation is the world’s fifth largest air force.

Another thing one sees in the news a lot…especially as a few people have been killed by sharks recently. One might think that sharks are a significant contributor to human fatalities. Well…outside of war…here’s a diagram of which animals kill the most humans.

9k9mbsuojzd71.png

Probably not something you expected. Don’t worry though…although malaria is present in some parts of Tanzania (where Neil is going) and in some parts of Costa Rica (where they’re both going in the summer)…it’s not prevalent in either of the areas they’ll be in. Nonetheless…Neil is taking prophylactic drugs while he’s in Africa to ward off any  potential bad stuff…and Connie verified that the CDC is correct a the mayor problem parasite in Tanzania is P. falciparum…but the drugs he will take from 2 days before to 7 days afterward will prevent any infection from those nasty li’l buggers.

And finally…in the latest instance of political correctness run amuck…the movie Mary Poppins has been reclassified in rating in the UK…from U to PG. This is because of…according to
this article…it contains ‘discriminatory language’. The particular offending language is the word hottentots which is a slang term for the original inhabitants of South Africa. Now back in the 60s when the movie was filmed this wasn’t a bad word but it is today so political correctness demands that we reclassify the movie.

I’m really tired of both the right and left in the 2020s trying to label behavior, language, customs, and normal social things from decades to centuries ago by today’s standards. Yes…today some terms are either actually derogatory or discriminatory or at least perceived by some groups as such…but it’s ludicrous to impose the standards of today on things that happened long ago. Those things from long ago should be judged of course…but they should be judged by the standards of the time, not by today’s standards. Nuts I tellya.

Cyas.

Posted in Critters, Learn Something New, Nerdery, Photography, WIldlife | Leave a comment

Depth of Field and Focus Stacking

Posted on 2024/02/03 by Gunther

Today boys and girls…Ima gonna lern ya ‘bout this thing called depth of field in photographs and why it’ important…and then we’re gonna segue into something called focus stacking which becomes necessary for close up or macro subjects. The reason for this is that Neil will be doing some macro photographs in Costa Rica in the summer so he figgered he better teach himself how to do it so that all the mistakes can be made when he’s not in the heat of battle in the tropics. 

But doncha worry…there’s an actual useful photograph later on.

OK, if you’ve ever looked at your hand in front of your face and then while still focused on your hand observed the stuff next to your hand in the field of view but across the room…and you’ve discovered that the farther away stuff is not in crisp focus…this is because of the depth of field of your eye. Now expanding this concept to photography…when you autofocus on the bird’s eye or use manual focus to do the same thing…not everything will be in focus…and for most subjects this is a good thing. A narrow depth of field results in what photographers call bokeh (pronounced bo-kay) which is what gives that pleasing buttery soft focus background behind whatever you are actually taking the photo of.

For instance take a look at this shot of a GBH in flight last week when he was up at Venice Rookery. As you can see, the bird’s eye is in perfect focus since that’s what the autofocus locked onto but the Great Egret in the lower left is slightly blurred and the trees in the background across the other side of the pond are even blurrier. This is depth of field in a nutshell.

Now depth of field (I’ll use the standard photographer abbreviation of DoF hereafter) varies based on a bunch of factors. The focal length of the lens (longer is shallower DoF than shorter), aperture in the lens used (wider open or smaller f numbers are shallower than stopped down or higher f numbers), and distance to the subject (closer is shallower) and in the above shot which was shot at 400mm focal length at F5.6 about 20 yards away the DoF is (according to the handy calculator for stuff like this on Neil’s iPhone) is about 0.83 meters or 32 inches. Since the GBH’s wingspan is about 6.5 feet…at that aperture the whole bird isn’t actually in complete focus either but the eye is which is the important part. 

For a landscape shot where you want everything in focus from right in front of you to the mountains out on the horizon…one typically stops the lens down and/or uses a wider angle to get everything in focus…or conversely you can do focus stacking which I’ll detail in a bit with 2 or maybe 3 images, one focused right in front of you, one about 1/3 the way into the scene, and one on the distant features. These three images are then blended in post processing (PP hereafter) so that the in focus parts of each image are combined into a single image. Fortunately…although one could do this tediously manually…software like Photoshop or other packages does the stacking part for you automatically.

So…from the above one would think that a shallow DoF is a good thing because it isolates your subject and minimizes the tendency of a viewer’s eye to drift away to the background or the pine cone on the ground and…the shallow DoF along with leading lines and light/dark areas sort of lead your eye through the image to tell the story the photographer intended.

But…not so fast. For distant wildlife shallow DoF is generally good and for landscapes wider DoF is better but not all wildlife is distant. When taking pictures of bugs, tree frogs, poison dart frogs, snakes and the like (which Neil will be doing in Costa Rica)…shallow DoF is not your friend.

Here’s an example…two shots taken of the coral base of a wood carving that Connie’s dad did. You’ll notice how the front of the base is in pretty decent focus in the first shot because that’s where Neil shot the image and in the second one it’s more the coral on the rear left that’s in sharp focus. He shot this with a pretty wide open aperture because in the rain forest stopping down isn’t generally possible due to lack of light. He also shot it at a focal length of about 300mm at a range of 4 or 5 feet…because that’s about as close as you want to get (even in a controlled situation with a trained critter handler on hand) to a viper or a poison dart frog…at least as close as he’s interested in getting.

So…the problem becomes how to get a wider DoF at close ranges. One is forced into a longer focal length and wider open aperture based on the limited amount of light and in actuality stopping the lens down doesn’t really gain you anything. At 3 feet for instance with a 300mm lens and f 5.6…depth of field is less than an inch and even stopping the lens way down to f22 which you never want to do anyway because of diffraction and lack of light it’s just barely more than an inch.

So…enter Focus Stacking. This technique requires a non moving critter or flower and you shoot a series of shots on your tripod…the first one you focus a little in front of the closest part of the subject you want in focus and take a shot, then focus a little farther away, another shot, and rinse and repeat until you’re past the most distant part of the subject you want in focus.

Back in the day…this was hard because the camera didn’t help at all…it was all manual focusing and taking another shot…and since critters are wont to move unexpectedly…you had to try a bunch of times to actually complete a series of shots. However…with modern cameras, particularly the mirrorless ones we have now…focus stacking is built in (at least the taking the pictures part). You focus just a bit closer than the closest part of your subject then select a number of shots you want to take. The cameras knows the lens length, aperture used, and distance it’s focused at and it takes the first shot, focuses a little farther away based on what it knows, and takes another shot…and the entire sequence proceeds at about 10 frames per second which minimizes the time for the critter to move in. In the examples below…Neil took 30 images but then reduced the series to 19 and 17 shots respectively since the remainder were past the subject.

OK…you’ve got your images, what next. Import them into Lightroom and on the first one you do all of your post processing…noise reduction, tones, colors, cropping, sharpening and so forth until that image looks the way you want (outside of the whole not everything is in focus part, ignore than for the moment). Then in Lightroom sync those changes to all the other images in the sequence so they all look the way you want. Next…you either open the images as layers in Photoshop or in whatever other software you use…and then the magic happens. Select all the layers and then select Auto Blend Layers and Photoshop picks the in focus parts of each image and combines all of them into a single layer. Save the final image and you’re done…although back in Lightroom you will probably still do a bit more touchup of the processing.

Finally…what does the output look like. Here are Neil’s two examples he shot and processed today. In each…the first shot is just one of the series so you can see how little of the subject is in focus and the second one is the focus stacked image. In the first set…the base is about a foot in diameter and the coral is 8 inches or so in diameter and the whole thing is about a foot tall. In the second series the eagle is about 5 inches tall.

OK, I promised you a real picture so here it is. Neil spotted this osprey out in the tree yesterday afternoon…he grabbed his 600mm and the 2x teleconverter for a total length of 1200mm and shot a burst. An osprey is about 24 inches long and about 17 or 18 tall in the position he’s sitting in…so this is a huge fish, probably 26-28 inches long and 4 pounds. The bird hovers over the water and dives in talons first then drags the fish to the surface and despite the bird only weighing about 3 pounds it’s able to launch from the water surface with a payload of more than it’s body weight. I’ve seen images in the past of one hauling off a fish that was up in the 6-8 pound range and it still took off successfully albeit not as graceful as with a lighter load. And it will eat that whole fish in a half hour or so.

 

Ok, on to interesting things found on the net.

I know you’ve all read about the ‘activist conservative dominated SCOTUS’ and how evil they are in the news…so I thought this illustration from a progressive dominated state Supreme Court out in Oregon was apropos as an illustration that both sides on whatever court they control tend to vote the way they think…but at least in this case the court basically disregarded what the law says because ‘we know the intent of the voters’ who passed the state constitutional amendment.

Here’s the
article…and it’s about a lawsuit filed out there in the state by the state Democratic Party. Back last year, 10 Republican lawmakers staged a walkout from the legislature to prevent a quorum which thereby prevented legislation they didn’t like from passing. The case isn’t about the legislation in question at all…and while they shouldn’t have walked out the Democrats in Texas did exactly the same thing either earlier last year or in 2022 but again…both were wrong to do so. In the interim…after that walkout in Oregon the Democrats put a state constitutional amendment to prevent any legislator who had 10 or more unexcused absences from running for reelection. Now actually…I think having some consequences for preventing the legislature from doing its job is a good thing…but ya know, the devil is in the details. In the actual text of the amendment that the voters approved…it says “lawmaker is not allowed to run “for the term following the election after the member’s current term is completed.” 

Now…work with me here. The legislators in question applied to be on the ballot this coming November for reelection and the Secretary of State disallowed them from being on the ballot because of the constitutional amendment. The problem is that the legislators are still in office and their current term does not end in November this year but in January of 2025 when the newly elected legislature is sworn in. Thus…the legal wording in the amendment says that they cannot run for reelection in 2028 since that is the term following the election after the member’s current term is completed. Since this is the clear wording in the law…those legislators sued and eventually it got to the state Supreme Court. That court decided that they didn’t need to follow the state constitution…but instead substituted their own judgement because the language is ‘ambiguous’ which it is not…and because ‘the voters understood the meaning of the ballot initiative to be for the immediate next term in office’. In other words…the court specifically ignored the clear text in the law and substituted their desire that the legislators be banned from running…talk about making it up as you go along. I guess we’ll see what happens next…there is no recourse after the state Supreme Court but I’m sure the legislators will appeal to the federal courts on denial of due process or not following the state constitution or whatnot…and we’ve seen situations before when a state Supreme Court was overruled by the federal courts based on the primacy of the federal constitution. 

As I said…consequences for legislators not doing their job is a good thing…but completely ignoring the law to substitute justice’s preferred outcome is just plain wrong…no matter which side is doing it.

And here’s one called Photoshop by Dad. Seems this mother was out of town on business travel and texted dad who was at home with the kid to see if he was doing things right…and here are the photos the dad texted back to mom.

Cyas.

Posted in Learn Something New, Photography, Ya Can't Fix Stupid | Leave a comment

Deliberations, Dilemmas and Decisions

Posted on 2024/01/30 by Gunther

Ya know…sometimes when you’re doing that whole triple D thing like the title says ya can just possibly overthink things a bit…and while I don’t think we’re at that point yet Neil does have one of ‘em to figger out…and at this point he’s seriously considering altering his photographic planning, a t least for birds here in FL.

Ya see…he got out last Saturday for his first outing of the season…it’s a little early for breeding and nesting activities but some of the critters have (as you will see) already gotten a head start. One of the folks he’s going to Africa in April with was on her annual visit down here to the Sunshine State to visit friends and see birds…so they got together for a morning of shooting up at Venice Rookery 50ish miles north of our home.

So he was taking both his Z8 and Z9 Nikon bodies and the latter has a recent update adding bird eye autofocus that he needed to try out…and long story short…wow, it’s a serious improvement over the older version of the firmware. And since it was birds he was taking his 600mm PF lens and decided to take the 100-400mm zoom lens as the second lens instead of the fixed 400mm prime lens…his thoughts were that while everybody knows that zooms are generally lower image quality than a prime lens they offer flexibility if you need a wider angle/shorter focal length over the prime…and for most practical purposes when you’re outputting images to be primarily viewed on screen the quality is pretty comparable…but the prime is generally a faster lens than the zoom is and the autofocus is therefore a bit faster (which is important for fast moving critters). Size and weight wise the two are pretty similar but he decided that the flexibility was more important. The goal for the day besides meeting one of his travel to Africa partners was to concentrate on bird eye autofocus and practice with moving birds in flight or BIF. 

He came home from the 3 hour shoot with about 1500 frames (hey, he did use 12 frames per second instead of the 20 the bodies will do so at least there was that limitation)…and imported all of them into Lightroom for processing. Tossing out the obviously bad shots…focus didn’t lock, clipped the wing or tail of the bird, and the inevitable oopsies…that got rid of about 400 which is a pretty good ration of decent shots. Then he did a first pass and got it down to 300ish to review for the blog and then reduced that to the 20something you’ll eventually see in this post. But as he was going through the processing…he wondered whether the flexibility of the zoom actually did him any good…so he fired up the Lightroom filters and filtered by focal length…and it turned out that about 90% of the decent shots were shot either with the 600mm prime, the 600mm prime withy the 1.4 converter for a focal length of 840, or the 100-400 with the focal length in the 360-400mm range…so in this case no, the flexibility provided him no advantage. He’s going to try again the next time he goes out in a couple weeks using the 400 and 600 but will put the 100-400 in his backpack just in case and if the trend continues he might just take the primes rather than the zoom for birding trips. On the other hand…the zoom is going to be the second lens in Africa along with the 600 because the sometimes short distances to the animals there would put the 400 out of the running for the shot…and sometimes you want to get environmental shots in addition to portrait shots.

Anyways…he culled the decent shots down to the 26 you see here and processed them for me so buckle up kiddos…

One thing though…Ima not going to identify the same species of bird 27 times for ya…so I’ll just do it once and then try and remember when you see the next same species. A few notes…the Great Blue Heron is also known as a GBH and their genders are the same in appearance…as are the Ospreys, Cormorants, and pretty much everything seen here with the exception of the Anhinga and Red Winged Blackbird which are sexually dimorphic. And these are shown in approximately the correct time sequence starting about10 minutes before dawn and running until 1030 or so. As he expected…the nesting waders had not really arrived in number but on the other hand he saw a total of at least 5 or 6 Ospreys fishing for breakfast, some not so successfully at first but most of them eventually caught something. They sort of hover over the water and then dive completely in talons first to grab the fish and then take off from the water.

Osprey with breakfast…this was the first one of the day and since it was still pretty dark he could only use 1/100 of a second shutter speed which resulted in lots of motion blur in the wings. But the new Z9 firmware caught the eye pretty well and he likes both the wing blur as well as the water drops heading back towards the lake.

Male Red Winged Blackbird

Double Crested Cormorant

Male Mottled Ducks

GBH flexing wings

Failed Osprey breakfast attempt

Hovering before the plunge

Another failure

And yet another failure

Female Anhinga…the male has black neck and breast…and both have much brighter green eyes at breeding season

Success

The last seconds before the plunge…but trying to follow it down to the water is pretty much an exercise in futility

Great Egret squawking IFF as it comes in for a landing

GBH bringing in some nesting material

Great Egret in breeding plumage (the stringy long feathers on the back half of the body)

Another GBH coming in for a landing

And being warned off by the nearby Great Egret in the lower right

Great Egret with nesting material

GBH chick…one of the ugliest babies you’ll see

And zooming in a little closer his little brother or sister. It hatched much later obviously based on size and will likely be killed by the larger chick so it can hog all the food that mom and dad bring

Black Crowned Night Heron…guess how it got the name?

The Great Egret on another nesting material delivery

Cormorant again

On the home front…nothing much to really report. Connie got her injured shoulder (she tripped over Neil’s foot in the dark) X-rayed and it isn’t broken so the doc is insisting on treating her for ‘slight indications of arthritis in the joint’ despite the fact that she told her it didn’t hurt until she tripped and landed on her elbows jamming the shoulder and producing a pretty spectacular bruise on her hip. I guess eventually the’ll do an MRI or CT to figure out the real problem after more pain medication doesn’t help (like it hasn’t helped ever since Thanksgiving). 

She found a Saint Saëns Organ Symphony concert up in Jax in a few weeks so they’re going to make a trip up there for it and to visit a couple of birding spots on a quick 3 day trip. And they’re schlepping up to Orlando before that to get their TSA interview for the trusted traveler program which lets you not take your shoes off or your laptop out of the bag and usually makes your stay in the TSA line at the airport shorter.

Our Elks Lodge needs to move again…since the building is being demolished. One group of members who have a 25 year old Scotch taste and a Natty Lite budget is still looking for a place to lease but they’re burying their heads in the same we think as nothing we can afford they will find acceptable and the ones they deem viable are too expensive. So another group of members is talking to a different lodge about merging and we think that’s the only outcome that makes financial sense for either us or the other lodge…and in addition it’s actually closer to home than where we are located now…and they have a kitchen with fried chicken dinners on Monday and fish dinners on Friday. The chicken is broasted which is a fryer/pressure cooker combo and they use just seasoned flour instead of a better so you get fried chicken with a lot less coating and grease than from the Colonel…it’s the 2nd or 3rd best fried chicken we’ve ever had. But we’re deliberately staying out of the political drama…we consider ourselves social members at this point so we do events and dinners and the like but skip the meetings except for election ones although to be honest there’s usually one person running for each office anyway so it’s really not much of an election.

I guess you saw where Nick Saban retired from coaching Alabama after the playoffs and they hired the fellow from Washington to be the new coach…he seems pretty good record wise but we’ll see how things go in the fall with new coaches and schemes.

Interesting things found on the net.

If you go
here…you can read about how the UK is trying to modify their Investigative Procedures Act to basically mandate encryption of out existence…and according to the interpretation the home office has given the legislation the law will apply to all countries worldwide no matter whether they have UK customers or not. Yeah…I’m sure all of the tech companies are going to agree with that.

You’ve probably read in the news or seen on TV the terrible problem of ‘microplastics’ and how they get into everything from bottled water to seafood to just about everything else…and how bad the things are for you. Well…that might be true and then again it might not be true…but from the news reports you probably think that this is mostly a US caused problem. But…you would be wrong. As reported here 88% to 95% of the microplastics are discharged into the oceans from the 10 rivers highlighted in red…and you’ll notice that none of them are in the US. Africa, China, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East are the main offenders…so the Blame America First crowd needs to shut up. I don’t know the actual source of the image…but it was tweeted by Massimo who is a pretty credible guy at finding the actual facts and verifying what he posts.

Image

And the dumbest one of the week comes to us from the city of Atlanta as noted
here. A small construction business owner in Atlanta bought an empty lot and as required before he can start construction he got the water company to come and put in a meter. And then he got a bill for almost $9,000 for using over 305,000 gallons of water in a month…while the average household only uses about 400. When the house was finally connected to the water line almost 2 years later the bill was about $13 a month. The company owner appealed the bill and was rejected by the Atlanta water company. He appealed that…and was again rejected despite the bills continuing and are now up to almost $30,000…and even though one board member agreed with him but was (in her words) ‘forced’ to vote against fixing the bill due to administrative processes. The company owner checked with the golf course across the street to see if they had any flooding problems and the answer was No…but they would have had issues with a leak of that magnitude. So…either the water leaked due to faulty installation of the meter, or the meter is faulty, or somebody stole the water but that seems a pretty unlikely cause as a truck would only hold about 10,000 gallons maximum if you stole the water and the amount would have been 30 trucks a month for several months. The water company admitted in the middle of this that the problem was actually caused by leakage due to water company employees…and at that point the owner figured the problem was solved…but that statement was denied by somebody higher up in the legal department at the water authority. Nuts.

Here’s one we found especially amusing…it comes from fark.com which references actual media articles and applies funny stories to them. As you may (or then again, may not) know…back in 1965 there was a truck crash in Scranton PA due to a load of bananas…30,000 pounds of them…on a truck that lost it’s brakes as it came down off of the mountains into the valley where Scranton is. The 33 year old driver intentionally eventually crashed the truck so it would not hit the gas station at the edge of town He swerved around pedestrians and eventually lost his life to save others. This crash would never have been really noticed outside of Scranton except for the accidental presence of one Harry Chapin who at that time was a young, struggling musician…who happened to be in the bus station catching a bus to someplace and read about the accident in the local newspaper…so he decided to write a song about it…you can read the
wikipedia article and learn all about the song, it’s alternate endings and such…the full version of the song is 20 per 25 minutes long so it was mostly played at concerts and not on the radio. Anyways…the name of the song is Thirty Thousand Pounds of Bananas and Neil and Connie had heard it in college…so naturally when we passed through Scranton in the RVing days we went to the spot, took pictures, and posted about it in the blog. 

And that’s all just to explain the lead in to the interesting thing found on the net. On fark.com there was a post linking to
this article…which details an accident up in CT where 40,000 pounds of bananas were spilled all over I-95. Fark.com links typically have an amusing headline rewrite…and the one used for this article was “It’s time to update the lyrics I guess.”

And the second dumbest one of the week…it’s apparently
illegal and you can go to jail out in Las Vegas on the strip if you commit the terrible crime of of stopping on a pedestrian bridge over the street to take a photograph.

And

322911-onya_marx.jpg

And finally…a li’l bit more of math nerdery. But…ya are gonna have to pull out your calculator because not even Neil was smart enough to do this in his head.

On your calculator…enter the first three digits of your phone number…not the area code though, the 4th through 6th digits of just the phone number part.

Multiply by 80.

Add 1.

Multiply by 250.

Add the last 4 digit of your phone number.

Add the last 4 digits of your phone number again.

Subtract 250.

Divide by 2.

Recognize the answer?

Cyas.

Posted in Critters, Photography, WIldlife, Ya Can't Fix Stupid | Leave a comment

It’s Been An Interesting Week

Posted on 2024/01/14 by Gunther

Well…we saw Michigan win the National Championship over Washington…and they did it pretty much the old fashioned Alabama way. They ran the ball well scoring 4 rushing touchdowns and played defense and as some old guy named Bear used to say…”Defense wins championships”.

Then the middle of last week Nick Saban announced his retirement as head coach at Alabama…he’s 72 and said that neither he or Miss Terry (his wife) are ill but that health and age were catching up to him and he (a) couldn’t coach like he really wanted to and (b) more importantly, kids and their families who he was recruiting wanted to know if he would be around 3 or 4 or 5 years and he didn’t feel like he could honestly say yes to that question any more. It was quite a shock to everybody…and I’m sure he and Miss Terry discussed it extensively…and I’m also sure that she told him to do what he wanted to do. Whether she gave him her honest opinion or not I have no idea…but after 52 years I’m pretty certain she told him both her honest opinion and also that he should do what felt right to him. He hung up the phone with her 5 minutes before a scheduled team meeting and according to him at the press conference later had not made up his mind when he hung up the phone.

So…we need a new coach. The best guy possible would have been…in the view of many…Kirby Smart who was his defensive coordinator for many years. But Kirby graduated from Georgia and moved there establishing himself and his own legacy…and he still uses “the process” that Nick uses although I’m sure it’s named something different…but the do your job, move on to the next play, don’t make stupid mistakes, run the ball, play defense, don’t make mistakes, and make the other team pay for their mistakes has been adopted by a lot of current coaches. I’m pretty sure that Kirby got asked and politely declined. Next choice would be…in my opinion…Lane Kiffin who was Nick’s offensive coordinator but Lane is really too much of a free spirit say what I think guy to really be successful in Tuscaloosa and he also said that following a legend was a really dumb idea in his opinion.

So…after a couple of days the new coat is Kalen DeBoer who was the coach at Washington. He took a 4-8 team when he arrived and was 25-3 in 2 years there…so he clearly knows how to coach. At his first job in the NAIA where talent is all pretty much equal and coaching and scheme are the ways to win…he went 60something and 3 with 3 national championships. Rumor has it as of today that his offensive coordinator and some of the other staff will follow him to Alabama. Alabama’s defensive coordinator retired after the season and the offensive coordinator is young and has no head coaching experience so although he would be an in house hire it’s risky.

Will this coach pan out? Dunno…it was hard replacing the Bear when he retired and the first 2 guys that replaced him, Ray Perkins and Bill Curry didn’t do well. Gene Stalling came in and both looked like and talked like the Bear and did well…but then he retired. The next 4 guys didn’t do very well and then Saban arrived in 2007 and you know the rest…6 national championships, 7 SEC championships, 9 SEC West titles, and a 189-27 record. Lost 6 games the first year and then never more than 3 and that only once. I think it will be a long time before we see another college coach do that in 17 years and it’s really hard to disagree that he’s the GOAT (greatest of all time) in the college coaching ranks. 

I do know that the guy that replaces the guy is frequently not successful and that the guy that replaces the guy that replaced the guy is generally more successful…but the new coach has demonstrated ability and we’ll have to wait and see.

My personal guess is that more than age and health…the name, image, and likeness rules that the NCAA now runs under that allows players to essentially go to another school anytime and the associated need to pay players was a far larger factor…some of the sports gurus agree with that and some don’t…and Saban is unlikely to ever say so himself. 

So…it’s the end of an era…and the beginning of a new one. We’ll miss seeing him on the sideline but time goes on and if he wants to stop and enjoy retirement like we are…that’s just fine and dandy.

Nothing much new here…it’s been cold and rainy…in fact this winter has been far and away the coolest and wettest of any we’ve seen since our first one in 2012., Dunno why but we’ve already worn jeans more days than any 2 other year put together…but we’ll buck up…at least it isn’t like Buffalo or Kansas City where they are playing NFL games in temps of minus something.

One small political observation. I know I’ve already told you want we think about the former President and that neither he, the current President, or the current Vice President should be elected in November…so I won’t repeat that here. I also think the SCOTUS will not kick him off the ballot like CO and ME are wanting to do…but again that isn’t relevant to this part. 

What I have been seeing is a whole lot of doom and gloom predictions that it will be the end of democracy and that he’ll suspend the constitution, kill his political enemies, and a whole lot of other things that lefties and people who hate the man are want to blather on about. My observation is that …yes, he might try and do all of those things…but then again he might not…and violating the constitution (in my opinion) to kick him off the ballot because the left has universally declared him to be an insurrectionist without a conviction or anything other than their opinion is just as much a violation of the constitution as they claim he will be. Let the man run…and either defeat him at the polls…or wait until he issues some Executive Orders that are clearly unconstitutional (and which will be immediately invalidated by the courts) and then impeach him. If he really tried to overturn the constitution…he would be impeached and convicted by large majorities of both parties. But doom casting and demanding that his right to run be eliminated just because you don’t like him and have an opinion that he’s ineligible is just plain wrong.

Interesting things found on the net.

This is a mourning dress worn back in the late 1800s by Queen Victoria of England. I didn’t realize until I saw the accompanying tweet with this image that she was only 4 feet 8 inches tall…

Image

According to
this post at snopes.com…one of the preeminent fact checkers on the internet…back in 2007 then Senator Joe Biden said

 “no great nation” can have uncontrolled borders” and proposed increased security along the U.S.-Mexico border, including a partial border fence and more Border Patrol agents.

Kinda seems like he’s changed his mind now that he’’s President and his administration basically wants an open border and just releases illegal immigrants into the US with an appointment to schedule a court date sometime in the indeterminate future (not that most of them will show up anyway, they’ll just fade into society, take low paid cash jobs, and continue to be criminals. And criminals is exactly what they are…the left likes to call them undocumented but that’s just bull crap…they’re criminals…period.

And the top 10 Senior Pickup Lines.

 

Cyas.

Posted in Homebody, Reality Based Blogging, Ya Can't Fix Stupid | Leave a comment