Fall Warblers 9/14/2013

A morning walk along the Lake Erie shoreline, south of Erie Rd. yielded some migrating fall warblers



Black and White Warbler

Palm Warbler

Tennessee Warbler

Cape May

Confusing Fall Warbler

American Redstart

 Finally an ode of sorts to Odonata

Two best friends that anyone can have.
Green Darner taking a damselfly under its wing.

Montana Hummingbirds

  
   Four days after I filled the hummingbird feeder at the Montana vacation rental I finally got some takers.  The bird in the first photo and the one in the second and third photos are probably Broad-taileds.

The last bird appears to be a immature male rufous, the bad news is that he looks like he has seen at least the inside of someone's mouth.  I think my dog has hacked up things that look fresher than this bird.

Big Stormy Sky Country

The Montana Sky opened up in a big way on Thursday afternoon when a thunderstorm passed within a couple of miles from our rental house.

  On our way back from a trip to Quake Lake my wife and I stopped at a scenic overlook and we noticed an anvil head cloud in the distance




Anvil head cloud from Quake Lake
(those are not cattails in the water but rather 30 ft dead trees killed in the flood when the lake was created during an earthquake in August 1959)

We made it back to the house before the storm passed by and I was able to get the following photos.

Back side of same cloud from our rental house

Lightning show begins

Big strike

Tangled double bolt

Storm passes behind nearby mountain

   If you have ever tried taking photos of lightning you understand that the best time to attempt it is nighttime,  when you can take long exposures to increase your chances of capturing a strike without overexposing your photo.  All the photos above were taken before sunset and were  1/5 to 1/8 of a second in duration which makes it tough to have the shutter open while the lightning flashes.  I took about 1300 photographs in order to get 10 or so to turn out. I also missed a few good ones while the shutter was closed momentarily between photos.

  Later in the evening the sky partially cleared before another distant storm skirted by.  In these photos I was able to capture stars in the clear part of the sky while lightning lit up the storm clouds.  They weren't the best star photos taken this week  nor the best lightning photos taken that day,  but it was pretty remarkable having an opportunity to photograph them simultaneously.

Stars of Scorpio next to storm cloud

Milky Way core visible on the left side of the photo

700 lbs of Crazy

 Q: What will send you back to your vehicle faster than a 700 lb beast, with weapons on his head, wading across a river toward you?

A: A 700 lb Elk that went from sparring with vegetation, to being attacked by imaginary water-demons, to calmly exiting the river, to lip-synching his bugling call then deciding to cross the river in your general direction.



   ♪ Rumour has it ♫

     It was all probably normal elk behavior and normal human behavior to get the hell out of his way.

Red Rock Lakes NWR

Early Sunday we drove out to Red Rock Lakes NWR to look for Moose.  We saw three plus Elk, Pronghorns and Mule Deer.

  Lots of raptors were seen there such as Red-Tailed and Swainson's Hawks along with American Kestrels and Northern Harriers.   

Big Starry Sky Country

  Day 1 :  Saw 1 bird in North Dakota.

Lark Sparrow

  Then a herd of horses in Theodore Roosevelt National Park.  Sadly we passed by this group about 10 minutes later and the young brown horse on the left side of the photo was laying flat on the ground as the others stood over it.



  A pronghorn greeted us at our rental on day 1 in Montana.



    Big Sky Country became Big Starry Sky Country when the Sun went down.  This photo shows the center of our Milky Way Galaxy in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.  The dark parts are clouds of dust and gas veiling the galaxy's core.

The second photo show the view overhead of the Cygnus-Orion Arm of our spiral Galaxy. Our solar system lies on the outskirts of this arm.

  Next photo is of the far regions of the Cygnus-Orion Arm, away from the core of the galaxy,  with the Andromeda Galaxy on the right side of the photo.

  The Andromeda Galaxy is comparable in size to our Galaxy.