Our trio of bluebirds is still sharing space with us – and I couldn’t be more delighted.
Autumn Blues
Author: Amanda A. Meader
Born and raised in Maine, my husband and I live on a lake in Maine with our dogs.
Fall colors
Summer has flown
A few photos from this summer.
Juvenile eagle
I watched her for about five minutes before she flew to the opposite shore.
Penobscot River Valley
Went looking for moose and found an American Bittern, a small heron that can be quite hard to spot. (Top picture has color enhanced.)
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/American_Bittern/overview
House Wren
Common Sandpiper
Muck skimmer
Heat got you feeling crazy?
America’s National Bird
Saw this eagle pair Sunday on the lake. Wind and waves made shooting challenging.
Moose
Painted Turtles
Out on the lake early this morning, searching for invasive milfoil. (Our lake has been one of the winners of the invasive weed contest since 2013. We discovered this fun fact when we bought our house in 2014. Our luck at finding a foreclosure with lake front was the poor fortune of a family whose children inked their names on the back of a garage stair case at some point before departing. Defiant gesture, perhaps, made my children with no control over the whims and weaknesses of the adults trying to raise them. To this day – literally this day – we find golf balls embedded in the back yard and the woods – smashed into the air by the father who couldn’t hold it together for his family.)
But back to the milfoil: A small team of volunteers scours our lake for several months each summer to help the professionals to help us. Searching for milfoil in a weedy cove from the seat of a kayak is slow work. I bring my camera and have it at the ready to add something for me to the task. At the front of my short, non-tippy (sit-on) kayak I have several milfoil buoys attached to anchors. These are ready to be tossed if I find what I don’t want to find. Then between my knees I have a bag with my camera, sunscreen, and other odds and ends. Coffee mug is busy wobbling around in a cup holder that is much too wide and insufficiently deep. (Maybe it is meant to hold a burger?) And all this only after I have managed to get myself into the kayak without tipping over into the lake. (Seriously, how does one do this gracefully?)
Then off I paddle, looking for milfoil and scanning for my animal friends. This morning I watched the osprey snag weeds for the nest (pictures coming soon). Watched small birds chase a great blue heron for a few quick moments of brave flapping wings. Heard my red-winged blackbirds. Didn’t mind when a small pale spider with a pot belly crawled across my leg and damselflies landed on my head, arms, feet. Watched my muskrat buddy munching on lake weeds in his usual spot. And my loons. Always my loons. No chicks this year, from what the loon count and my observations tell us.
And oh, the turtles! Turtles on logs. Turtles on rocks. Turtles lazy-paddling through lake weeds; turtles wriggled into lake bottom mud. Snappers that may be closing in on 40 years old. Painted turtles new to the world, or tired from three decades of enduring. Along the way I found this darling baby painted turtle. About twenty feet away I spotted an adult painted sunning on a rock. Turtles startle easily, so I was thrilled to get a handful of pictures of this little fella. (Hooray for my zoom lens!)
Some days close enough is close enough
Sharing photos despite the fact that they are not crisp images.
Hungry Fledglings
Four phoebe fledglings ready to fly. Watched them off and on today from my home office. Such a cold day that we lit a fire in the woodstove. Rain and wind made miserable conditions for all. The nest has grown tight and one of the fledglings in particular is restless and ready to explore the world beyond. The parents swoop in to feed so quickly that I struggled to snap clear images.
Update: Twenty-four hours later and the nest is empty. It was a windy day and the first bird to fledge struggled to find his footing. (Footing?!) He ended up on the ground under a drain spout so we hustled the dogs into the house, did some quick research (thanks Avian Haven!) and prepared a back-up nest that we could put him in next to his siblings. Thankfully he had flown off (presumably to the nearby tree line with his parents) in the interim. (That was mid-morning.) As I write this it is 7:10 pm and we’ve been out in the yard (again, with our dogs) and I’m quite certain I say two of the fledglings practicing landings and take-offs in a nearby tree.
She is under the deck where her children are nesting. She is actually wondering why they can’t be quite.
The Nature of Maine 