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Birding

End of June Dragonflies and Damselflies

Birding

Common Baskettail Dragonfly, Epitheca cynosura

Birding

Argia Publication – Furtive Forktails, Ischnura prognata

Dark-eyed Junco
Astronomy, Birding

Holiday Time

The year is almost over when the holiday season begins but it’s a wonderful season. Despite everything (like COVID) this starts one of my favorite times of the year. Friends, family and good cheer–and that’s just part of it. I love birding in the winter, in fact, that’s the best time to go birding because there are fewer mosquitoes, ticks, and poisonous snakes with which to contend. No more spraying down with bug spray and struggling to put on snake boots before I ...
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North Carolina Swamp
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Restoring the Swamp

When we first moved to our house, all around us was swampland with a few agricultural fields out front. After twenty years of living there, the owners of the swampland have been aging and a few have passed on. Unfortunately, although we tried to convince folks to do something to conserve the swamp, they ignored us and their heirs have been clear cutting the swamp. It’s sad, but that’s the way of the world. We couldn’t afford to buy all of the swamp, but after they clear ...
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Hummingbird feeding
Birding

Taming the Wild

Over the years, we’ve fed a lot of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds. Back in 2009, we had so many hummingbirds that it was almost annoying. Check out the video below. It starts out slow but wait for the end. Sadly, there was a hurricane during migration the next year and we’ve never had quite so many birds since then, but we still get a lot. This year, we have about 14 “steady customers” coming to our feeders. Lately, I got the notion of hand feeding the hummers. They are ...
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Astronomy, Birding

Hot, humid, but still out there

It is unbelievably hot in the swamp these days, although it’s actually cooler in the swamp than on the lawn, thanks to the lovely trees and their shade. I’ve also been out at night looking at the stars and planets, and have had my eye on the Neowise comet. My telescope needs some work done on it, so I’ve been a little hampered as far as photographing things like Neowise, Jupiter, and Saturn, but I recently got a Google Pixel 4XL which has a night mode that allowed me to ...
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Birding

Into the Swamp

Today, we (I have to include the dogs, after all) took our daily walk through the swamp. On the way there, I passed a Northern Cardinal nest in our driveway and noticed that the adults are now feeding chicks. So, even though I thought I was finished with Nest Watch, I’ve gone ahead and added it to my app. I’d been taking notes when I noticed the female cardinal sitting dutifully on her nest at the edge of our driveway, so I had the data to add to my monitoring log. Mama Northern ...
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iNaturalist
iNaturalist
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