Today’s Friday Feathers are some of my holiday pics.
i need tore4start the Barcelona series, but for now there’s a young Mediterranean seagull. I love how the juveniles look completely different from the adults
©Giliell
More perfect shots from Nightjar, this time Hummingbird Hawk Moth Macroglossum stellatarum.
©Nightjar, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
It reminded me of a fun anecdote – during my studies at uni, one of my half-classmates mentioned one evening in the pub that he has observed a beautiful hummingbird in his garden. Pedantic killjoy as I am, I have pointed out that there are no hummingbirds in Europe, so what he has in fact observed was in this moth.
It was mildly embarrassing moment, because he was his half-classmateship was the biology half (me studying Biology-Chemistry, him studying Biology-IT). But there was no real reason for him to be embarassed. Nobody has perfect knowledge about everything and their similarity to hummingbirds in flight is really uncanny.
I have seen these beautiful moths occasionaly in my garden, but never when I had camera in hand.
There will be more spiders from you! In the meantime, I think this green spider looked lovely when it waved at me from our plum. The way it was running around on that leaf it looked like some sort of dance routine.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Shake it to the left…
Shake it to the right…
Oh, didn’t see ya there. Hi!
Inukshuk on the Portage River, ©voyager, all rights reserved
This is another section of the Portage River and if you look closely you can see that someone has taken the time to build a few inukshuk on the shoal, probably while waiting for a fish to bite. The water here is very clean and these are bring home to eat fish if you can catch one.
Since we’re apparently running spider week, here are mine. I took the pics last year at my parents’ place.
The pics are shot with the magnifying lens and each spider baby is about the size the head of a pin.
©Giliell
©Giliell
©Giliell
Or “never trust a recipe over experience”.
Last year, the blackberries fell victim to a hungry deer that ate all the flowers. This year, they#re getting ripe and are delicious, so I decided to make muffins.
I googled a basic recipe for cream cheese and blueberry muffins and came up with the following:
OK, I exchanged the oil for butter and the buttermilk for Greek yoghurt (which was only a quarter cup), yet still it seemed to be a lot of liquid, but well, that#s what the recipe said. The taste was delicious, but they did what muffins do when they are too wet: they crawled all over the baking tray.
Next time, less yoghurt.
Looks good
© Giliell
Tastes good
©Giliell
Walter Sorrels musings on The Handmade Dilemma.
More butterfly pictures. I am envious of the scarce swallowtail. I have never seen one of those live. What a sight.
© Nightjar, click for full size.
Enjoy!
Iphiclides podalirius
Vanessa atalanta
Vanessa cardui
Barachois, Gaspe Peninsula©voyager, all rights reserved
This is one of two public beaches in a small community that sits on the northern edge of the Malbaie Salt Marsh called Barachois, which fittingly means salt marsh in French. We don’t come to this beach very often because it is mostly sand an I find sandy beaches pretty boring. I’d much rather go to a stony beach where you can beach-comb for treasure. I’ve found all sorts of interesting things on the beaches of Gaspe; fossils, agates, seaglass (I have a large collection of this), pretty stones only some of which I can identify, bones and driftwood. I collect and then negotiate with my husband about how much I am allowed to take home. As a result I have collections here and there. At home I’ve made a little beach that grows year by year, but here my treasures mostly live in jars because the real beach is so close by. I say you can keep your groomed white sand beaches. Give me the sticks and stones and bones on a beach full of treasure.
Amazing how expressive a few cuts in the wood and an occasional hole can be.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
This week’s Wednesday Wings come from avalus, who writes:
Usually I can not take pictures of birds with my cellphone cam due to the lack of good zoom. But last week a friend and I helped this little fellow to escape the architectural nightmare and birdkiller, that is the our chemistry departent building. It is made of lots of glass and with windows in odd places and every so often we find birds that have flown in but could not escape again and died. This one was already pretty exhausted, as I doubt we could have caught it with the box otherwise. It did not put up any resistance.
This story had a happy end, we released the little one a minute or so after taking this picture: We took away the cardboardpane we used to cover the box, the little one looked at us puzzeled, left droppings in the box and flew away.
I do have no idea what kind of bird this is.
©avalus
I think it’s a juvenile Redstart that got caught in the lab.
Nightjar has sent some exquisite butterfly pictures. I love the first one. The contrast between the blue butterfly and pink blossom is just amazing, and the focus is simply perfect.
© Nightjar, click for full size.
Enjoy!
Celastrina argiolus.
Colias sp.
Vanessa cardui
Weighty things on his mind today, ©voyager, all rights reserved
Jack did a lot of swimming at the beach today. Usually he’ll go after a stick a few times and after that he prefers to just paddle around close to shore. Today, though, he couldn’t get enough. Again and again he wanted us to throw out a stick for him to bring back. He kept it up for close to half an hour which is a lot of exercise for a 10 year old puppy. By the time we got home he was totally exhausted. He followed me into the bathroom, laid himself down and proceeded to sleep for the next 2 hours just as you see him here.