I caught this little guy yesterday (don't worry, I didn't catch him with my bare hands) a tiny copperhead. I thought the little yellow tail was interesting so I looked it up, it's a newborn baby copperhead. Yes, they are poisonous but so pretty and so interesting to look at close up.
Copperheads are pit vipers so I got to get a close look at the heat sensing "pits" on the front of its head and its tell-tell elliptical pupils.
Can i get up in the morning, put the kettle on.
Me and my camera and my dogs are still going for our walks. I have stopped posting my pictures on 300 walks, but I think the spirit of the idea still exists. I will admit that I may not make it to 300 and the summer heat has slowed me down, but there isn't a week that goes by without us plummeting into the the thick stand of pines behind the house, my camera in hand with my three pups leading the way. My newest experiment involves me carrying a large white piece of foam core board along too. I need to perfect the process. It is hard to hold the board up behind whatever I want to isolate with one hand and take the picture with the other. If I need to make any adjustments to the camera settings I have to put everything down, fiddle with the camera and then reframe. By then the dogs have gotten bored with me and wondered off.
Went kayaking with a new friend at the state park today. It was such quiet, easy fun. We checked out the birds, spotted an alligator gar in a little pool, found a giant turtle shell. The older I get the harder it is for me to make new friends. I'm not sure if it is simple and I make it complicated, or if it is complicated and I just wish it was simple. I'm over thinking it - I think.
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
New snake. I think I have it identified. It's an Eastern Yellowbelly Racer, a juvenile. Coluber constrictor flaviventris. He was so pretty, but feisty, bit me twice.
