Traffic and car woes

Last week was interesting, to say the last. On Wednesday, we celebrated our eighteenth wedding anniversary with a dinner at an almost empty restaurant. The food was good, but the fact that there were more waiters than guests was a little disconcerting.
To get away from some stressful issues and to hopefully photograph some migrants or butterflies, I ventured out to Beechwood last Friday. Bad idea! I was stuck in traffic three times on the way to and from the nature reserve and any thought of relaxation went out the window. Had I known that I would hit two traffic jams on the way home, I would have never left the house. To top it all off, I didn't see any birds or butterflies there. Where have they all gone? I did see a wooly bear, though.
Sometime last week, I must have driven through a freshly painted line because my car is all white on the bottom of the passenger side. To assess the damage, I pulled the car out of the garage and decided to finally check out that rattling noise my car makes whenever I start it. I still don't know where the noise comes from, but my husband and I found a whole winter's supply of peanut shells scattered all over the engine room. With the aid of a vacuum cleaner, an old toothbrush, a barbecue skewer and other long sticks, we were able to get most of the debris out of there.
Lesson learned: Don't store any open bird feed in your garage!

Walking down Memory Lane

When I returned from my trip to Germany, my husband told me that I needed to clear some space on our computer or he would do it for me. So I spent the hot, humid days of August glued to the computer, getting rid of thousands of bird photos I had taken during the last few years. I guess I had planned to delete them once I got better ones and then forgot about it. While I saved my best images on CDs and on an external hard drive, I'm a bit paranoid about losing anything. Besides, I like to work with them on the computer without having to go through all my CDs. I'm not sure how much space I actually freed up on our hard drive since it's not the .jpegs as much as the .tif photos that take up room. I save each photo that I consider a keeper as a .tif before reverting it to .jpeg again if I want to use it for something specific (such as forwarding it to my stock agencies or getting prints made from it). JPEG is a lossy format and each time you open a photo, the image data gets compressed and the image deteriorates. Therefore, it is advisable to save all good photos as .tif first.
Going down memory lane was very interesting, though. For one, I realized how much my photos have improved since I first started photographing birds. I also like to go back and revisit them to check what time of year I photographed a certain migrant. For example, last year I photographed a junco on November 5. I gasped, because that's less than two months away. Where has the year gone? It seems like they just left, especially since it was so cold in April that their departure was delayed. That means also that it's almost time to stock up on bird feed and clean the feeders.

Late Summer Rambling

My last trip to Beechwood was not very fruitful. My best photo was that of the lone monarch I saw there. We have more of them at home. I did see, but not photograph, a warbler, a wren and some cedar waxwings. Butterflies were scarce that day, but so it goes.
Our own little butterfly garden is a hotbed of activity. We're having a good crop of monarch larvae this summer and also milkweed moths and bugs. Amazing that a poisonous plant such as milkweed (we have butterfly weeds and milkweed) can support so much wildlife. We're also seeing bumble bees and honey bees, all kinds of butterflies but not as many swallowtails as in the past.
I'm seeing and hearing more birds in our yard, including a pileated woodpecker. The male hummingbirds appear to have departed, yet the young ones are still around fighting over the nectar. They're also visiting our flowers, particularly the zinnias. I'll definitely plant those again next year.