Wounded bird in flight
casts shadow of fear and hope?
No, autumn leaf falls.
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Category: birds
Petrified
Nesting kestrel turns
to see whose approach it hears.
Medusa quits birding.
Long after making a small cairn from these three stones, I noticed a slight resemblance to a nesting kestrel. Long after that, I recalled the old myth about what happened to people who looked at Medusa’s face. Kudos to Medusa for seeing the effect of her hobby and changing course. She switched to making stoneware pottery.
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Teenager
Too old for childhood;
too young for raising children.
Blurry persona.
Like many juvenile birds, this male cardinal sat still and looked befuddled, then changed position a little, and then sat still and looked befuddled. With his face centered in the focus frame and a moderately fast shutter speed, he should have been in focus. My camera’s autofocus probably got distracted by the twigs all around him. While my camera has good manual overrides for most of its automatic choices, its manual focusing is a lame joke. So I made lemonade from lemons with the final line of my haiku.
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How Wild Cherries Ripen
Redden, then blacken,
then become any color
in a bird’s feathers.
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Daydream
Stoneware bowl
imagines being …
balsa bird.
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Vocal Visitor
Caw from unseen bird.
Crows are louder and shriller.
Could be a raven.
Overlay © John Cobb | Unsplash
While my own sightings are few and long ago, I believe ravens still inhabit the region where I live and am confident that I can distinguish the croaking caw of a raven from the canonical caw of a crow. (Don’t hike much any more; still big on alliteration.) I also have some of indigenous folklore’s admiration of ravens, so I celebrated hearing one with a haiku. That posed a problem.
An ordinary image of a raven would not work for my haiku about an unseen bird thought to be a raven. I considered posting the haiku by itself, but I like images. Hmmm. I can photograph the nondescript view toward where the call seemed to originate. Can I then find and tweak an image of a raven to make a ghostly overlay that fits the mood of the haiku? Yes!
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Mourning Dove in Winter
Ozzie Had His Head on Straight
David Eppley’s photo of a bald eagle named Ozzie was among the fan favorites in the Weather Channel’s 2016 Photo Contest. The same excellent photo inspired a haiku that can respond to a CDHK challenge about daffodils. Really.
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Carpe Diem #1832 Narcissus (Daffodils)
Mythornithology
When we saw himself,
Narcissus forgot to drink.
Eagle had more sense.
Click here to see more images and read interesting facts about flowers in the genus Narcissus (AKA daffodils).
Click here to see more images from the Weather Channel’s 2016 Photo Contest.
Light Show
The weather is warm and will soon be hot, so I leave my camera behind when I smuggle in a quick walk between chores. As Murphy’s Law predicts, I see something I want to photograph. While the scene itself is common enough, the way light caroms off part of it (and then to me) is not. Oh well, for now I can write a haiku. Maybe later I can get an image close to what I see?
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Red-winged Blackbird
Sun shines. Bird mutters.
Perched on power line, flicks tail.
Day-Glo epaulets.
Hmmm. Buy a download of a promising large image (6750×4500 pixels):
© Steve Byland | 123RF Stock Photo
Rotate it. Crop tightly (down to 635×912). Boost saturation and visual contrast. Yes, the result is like the red and gold on black that I saw when the light was just right:
Sometimes it takes a good deal of editing to tell the truth.
Sky Sights and Sky Sounds
Sky Circles
Riding the spring wind,
hawks with still wings and shrill cries
claim territory.
© Steve Byland | 123RF Stock Photo
A lot happens in the sky.
Hawks stake claims.
Clouds sometimes imitate clams.
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How to Hide in Plain Sight
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The challenge illustrates a familiar way to hide in plain sight, by being a small part of a complex scene. My response illustrates another way, by being quick and unexpected. While a classic experiment using a fake gorilla provides one example, my response uses a genuine wren.
So long ago that I was using color negative film, I took a photo of a wren feeding his/her chicks. When I eventually got the print back from the lab, I saw something I had never seen before and have not seen since:
The parent’s tail feathers fan out to brace against the outside of the nest box, forming almost a half-circle. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it. The shutter clicked at a lucky instant, freezing a detail of the momentary handoff that I have never seen in real time.
To get a web image, I scanned the old print and looked more closely at the scanned image while deciding how to crop it. A bird splat on the nest box was hiding in plain sight (the familiar way) and was now a distraction. No problem. Any decent photo editing software could remove it, as mine did.
Sad to say, all my instances of hiding in plain sight the familiar way are like that banished bird splat. Experiencing a scene in real time, I either do not notice or can easily ignore power lines, bright reflections, and whatever else detracts from the good stuff. Examining a photo later, I find that whatever hid (by being a small part of a complex scene) is now so distracting that I must tone it down if I cannot remove it.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The invisible gorilla experiment is a classic example of hiding in plain sight by being quick and unexpected. The resulting book is a good read exploring several ways that people often overestimate their abilities.
Almost Half Circle
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Dirty Look Thru Dirty Window
My seed feeder is hung just outside my living room window. Please pretend that the white specks in my hasty snapshot are snowflakes, not crud on plexiglass that refuses to stay clean (but is springy enough to prevent serious injury when a bird tries to fly thru it).
Hey, stupid! The feeder’s empty!
When I am slow to refill the feeder, birds rummage in the tray and sometimes find a seed among the debris that has accumulated. Then they usually go elsewhere for a while.
Sometimes a chickadee (but never a bird of another species) has a different response. The chickadee sits on the edge of the tray (looking into my house) and glares at me. Corvids and parrots are not the only brainy birds.
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Warned by a Shadow
From some viewpoints, a shadow has a bright side. An example is my response to a CDHK challenge to use the word [shadow] in a haiku.
Carpe Diem Haiku Family — A New “Shadow” Challenge
Image cropped from © Ryanfaas | Dreamstime.com
Lost Lunch?
Sunlight breaks thru clouds
and sends hawk’s shadow downward.
Prey darts for cover.
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Amazing Photos Out There
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While I did not take the photos shown here, I did write the haiku.
Many amazing photos have been submitted to the Weather Channel’s It’s Amazing Out There / 2016 Photo Contest. The contest has both expert judging and voting for the “fan favorite” by anybody with a Facebook account. U can vote daily until 2016-08-26 and distribute those votes however U like. Having viewed only a few of the submissions, am I competent to recommend votes to other people? Not really, but Donald Trump has set the competence bar low enough to be cleared by a garden slug. Being a little more competent (and a lot more honest) than Trump, I will share my enthusiasms anyway, with cropped/resized versions of 2 submissions.
While I have been voting enthusiastically for Coming Storm by CJDraper (aka Dancing Echoes on WordPress), I also want to salute the fan favorite as of the last time I looked: Ozzie (a bald eagle) by Davedc. The latter already has plenty of well-deserved votes, so I wrote a haiku inspired by it.
Mythornithology
When we saw himself,
Narcissus forgot to drink.
Eagle had more sense.
Swamp Colors
The view thru binoculars of a blue heron foraging in a sea of water lilies was almost as good as in a nature film, and there is something special about actually being there.
Mellow Curmudgeon 