photoblogging: Beauty in unexpected places

Just a series of snapshots Jessica and I took a while back...and a Steve Earle song that sprang to mind.

NFA field meet, January '12

The meet was supposed to start with a slip at grouse at dawn on Saturday, but we got started late and were promised a chance at pheasant instead. When we got to the pheasant field, what did we see but a flock of grouse putting into a cornfield?

[Eric Johnson and Gunner]


Of course, when we ran in to flush the grouse...


...a couple of pheasant got up and one was promptly taken by Anita Johnson's gyr x peregrine, Riddick.



[Gunner gets a hug]



We (Jessica, Ellie and I—Jess took all the photos, by the way) missed a couple of flights: Chris Podraza's unfortunately-named redtail, Bubbles, and a Harris' hawk flown by Nick Morris. Had we known we would be the only ones flying Sunday morning, we might have made more of an effort to stay with the group, but as it turned out the rest of the meet belonged to Stekoa. He took a rabbit on Saturday afternoon and two more on Sunday morning.

[Maxine]





[Donna Vorce shows off her burr collection]



[Ellie picked up some burrs as well—actually we all did; at one point, we were scooping them up by the handful and throwing them at one another like snowballs.]



[Stekoa stoops into a cornfield—this was a miss, but both of his rabbits Sunday morning made the mistake of leaving the riparian woods and were taken in the corn stubble.]

photoblogging: Lincoln railway station

Stekoa having caught a rabbit the day before, Jessica and I took an afternoon to shoot pictures at the train station downtown.




Chicago, Burlington & Quincy engine 710, built in Havelock—then (1901) a railroad town near Lincoln, now a neighborhood within Lincoln.


A modern successor rolls through.


De-evolution of the baggage cart: the older ones have so much more character.




I like the simplicity of the graphics on these old boxcars; they remind me somehow of fruit-crate labels or old WPA posters.








An assortment:

Cassowaries, and more of the world's most awfulest things

Duncan Wright at 10,000 Birds has a nice essay on his native land of Australia, a wonderful place where everything is potentially out to get you:

“You don’t have to move far off the plane to step into the danger zone. Lurking in the suburban lawns of Sydney are the deadly Funnelweb Spiders. Sharks cruise off the city’s beaches, and just yesterday a deadly species of snake was found in a suburban railway station. Further afield, there is a poisonous mammal, the platypus, many waterways are filled with the carnivorous Saltwater Crocodile, and a species known as the box jellyfish is so dangerous that it causes the closure of every beach across the entire north of the continent for several months each year, an achievement that the sharks can only look at in wonder.”

RTWT.

Jessica's comment was, "God made Australia so that most of the world’s most awfulest things can be easily avoided."

Meanwhile, we're limited to just a few statistically insignificant wildlife hazards, like the odd mountain lion... [Sigh.]


I'll save you the trouble...here's the list from Wikipedia.