Obstructions

On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 15:06:52 -0600, wrote:

On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 20:32:10 GMT, R Brickston
rb20170REMOVE.yahoo.com@ wrote:

On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 12:09:08 -0600, wrote:

On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 08:27:46 GMT, R Brickston
rb20170REMOVE.yahoo.com@ wrote:

Tarantulas migrate? What were these Army Tarantulas? Or perhaps a new
sub-species of traveling Tarantula somehow related to the Monarch
butterfly.

Dear RB,

Yes, male tarantulas "migrate" in search of females, both singly and
in large, mindless swarms, which is one reason that they're so often
seen crossing roads:

"Exactly when male brown tarantulas go a-roaming seems determined by
the weather. Their movements tend to occur after a rain in early
morning or late afternoon. Mass sightings are rare but memorable.
Arachnologist David Sissom of West Texas A&M University in Canyon
recalls braking to a stop on Highway 385 just south of Odessa early
one summer morning in 1986. 'There were hundreds of tarantulas
crossing the road, all moving in the same direction,' he says. 'For
100 yards or so, there was easily a tarantula every meter or two. It
was pretty incredible.'"

http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/...988&issueId=70

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Dear Carl,

While I don't dispute what Sissom saw, the article doesn't reveal
whether that occurance was normal, a rarity or even a one off.

RB

Dear RB,

http://www.k6sgh.com/migration.htm

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Egads! Carl...

As you can see from the picture from the above quoted site:

http://www.k6sgh.com/migration_2006/one.jpg

there are thousands of them!

On Tue, 05 Jun 2007 00:10:26 GMT, R Brickston
rb20170REMOVE.yahoo.com@ wrote:

On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 15:06:52 -0600, wrote:

On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 20:32:10 GMT, R Brickston
rb20170REMOVE.yahoo.com@ wrote:

On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 12:09:08 -0600, wrote:

On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 08:27:46 GMT, R Brickston
rb20170REMOVE.yahoo.com@ wrote:

Tarantulas migrate? What were these Army Tarantulas? Or perhaps a new
sub-species of traveling Tarantula somehow related to the Monarch
butterfly.

Dear RB,

Yes, male tarantulas "migrate" in search of females, both singly and
in large, mindless swarms, which is one reason that they're so often
seen crossing roads:

"Exactly when male brown tarantulas go a-roaming seems determined by
the weather. Their movements tend to occur after a rain in early
morning or late afternoon. Mass sightings are rare but memorable.
Arachnologist David Sissom of West Texas A&M University in Canyon
recalls braking to a stop on Highway 385 just south of Odessa early
one summer morning in 1986. 'There were hundreds of tarantulas
crossing the road, all moving in the same direction,' he says. 'For
100 yards or so, there was easily a tarantula every meter or two. It
was pretty incredible.'"

http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/...988&issueId=70

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Dear Carl,

While I don't dispute what Sissom saw, the article doesn't reveal
whether that occurance was normal, a rarity or even a one off.

RB

Dear RB,

http://www.k6sgh.com/migration.htm

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Egads! Carl...

As you can see from the picture from the above quoted site:

http://www.k6sgh.com/migration_2006/one.jpg

there are thousands of them!

Dear RB,

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...migrati on%22

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 19:30:32 -0600, wrote:

On Tue, 05 Jun 2007 00:10:26 GMT, R Brickston
rb20170REMOVE.yahoo.com@ wrote:

On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 15:06:52 -0600, wrote:

On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 20:32:10 GMT, R Brickston
rb20170REMOVE.yahoo.com@ wrote:

On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 12:09:08 -0600, wrote:

On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 08:27:46 GMT, R Brickston
rb20170REMOVE.yahoo.com@ wrote:

Tarantulas migrate? What were these Army Tarantulas? Or perhaps a new
sub-species of traveling Tarantula somehow related to the Monarch
butterfly.

Dear RB,

Yes, male tarantulas "migrate" in search of females, both singly and
in large, mindless swarms, which is one reason that they're so often
seen crossing roads:

"Exactly when male brown tarantulas go a-roaming seems determined by
the weather. Their movements tend to occur after a rain in early
morning or late afternoon. Mass sightings are rare but memorable.
Arachnologist David Sissom of West Texas A&M University in Canyon
recalls braking to a stop on Highway 385 just south of Odessa early
one summer morning in 1986. 'There were hundreds of tarantulas
crossing the road, all moving in the same direction,' he says. 'For
100 yards or so, there was easily a tarantula every meter or two. It
was pretty incredible.'"

http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/...988&issueId=70

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Dear Carl,

While I don't dispute what Sissom saw, the article doesn't reveal
whether that occurance was normal, a rarity or even a one off.

RB

Dear RB,

http://www.k6sgh.com/migration.htm

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Egads! Carl...

As you can see from the picture from the above quoted site:

http://www.k6sgh.com/migration_2006/one.jpg

there are thousands of them!

Dear RB,

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...migrati on%22

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Someone must have taken at least one photo of this event. Please post.

On Sun, 03 Jun 2007 01:13:09 -0600, wrote:

[snip]

Finally, here's about ten pounds of expectant mother, a bit bigger
than a bike helmet. Inflamed by a thunderstorm, she foolishly dug a
nest this afternoon at the edge of a sandy but poorly drained two-rut
road, fifteen feet from her marsh:
http://i12.tinypic.com/6gxpi1g.jpg

Tails are often broken or truncated, but this tail is pristine, ready
for the show ring. (Yes, I once kept them as pets, but no, there are
no formal best-of-show competitions.)
http://i13.tinypic.com/4zvf9nb.jpg

Excellent shell, little moss, no leeches, no holes:
http://i17.tinypic.com/6434ia9.jpg

The tail has been moved to one side to show to advantage, while the
eye catches the camera flash:
http://i8.tinypic.com/5y9huds.jpg

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Snapping turtles don't bask much, but they often float far out on a
nearby pond, so this evening I was looking for the tell-tale shell and
head just barely above the water.

Alas, I saw nothing but ducks and geese.

However, part of a cottonwood log covered with dry gray bark was
sticking up out of the water in a nearby narrow channel.

After watching the log for a while, I climbed a convenient tree and
took some pictures of the log, which was close to three feet long from
the tip of its nose to the end of its tail:

http://i9.tinypic.com/5xzxetu.jpg

You can see that my Tarzan act has disturbed the log, which has raised
its head and is ready to deal with any irritating ducklings that come
too close. The two bottles give some idea of the size of the log, most
of which is below the waterline. Judging by the logs that I kept as
pets, this one is easily over twenty pounds.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

wrote:
On Sun, 03 Jun 2007 01:13:09 -0600, wrote:

[snip]

Finally, here's about ten pounds of expectant mother, a bit bigger
than a bike helmet. Inflamed by a thunderstorm, she foolishly dug a
nest this afternoon at the edge of a sandy but poorly drained two-rut
road, fifteen feet from her marsh:
http://i12.tinypic.com/6gxpi1g.jpg

Tails are often broken or truncated, but this tail is pristine, ready
for the show ring. (Yes, I once kept them as pets, but no, there are
no formal best-of-show competitions.)
http://i13.tinypic.com/4zvf9nb.jpg

Excellent shell, little moss, no leeches, no holes:
http://i17.tinypic.com/6434ia9.jpg

The tail has been moved to one side to show to advantage, while the
eye catches the camera flash:
http://i8.tinypic.com/5y9huds.jpg

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Snapping turtles don't bask much, but they often float far out on a
nearby pond, so this evening I was looking for the tell-tale shell and
head just barely above the water.

Alas, I saw nothing but ducks and geese.

However, part of a cottonwood log covered with dry gray bark was
sticking up out of the water in a nearby narrow channel.

After watching the log for a while, I climbed a convenient tree and
took some pictures of the log, which was close to three feet long from
the tip of its nose to the end of its tail:

http://i9.tinypic.com/5xzxetu.jpg

You can see that my Tarzan act has disturbed the log, which has raised
its head and is ready to deal with any irritating ducklings that come
too close. The two bottles give some idea of the size of the log, most
of which is below the waterline. Judging by the logs that I kept as
pets, this one is easily over twenty pounds.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Looking at the apparent size of the 'log' I can tell I would not want to
mess with it. I picked some up on interstate 40 in Oklahoma to put them
out of harm's way and they did their level best to bite me. I tried the
pencil test since I had one in the car and the test turtle bit it clean
in half. Feisty little buggers.
Bill Baka

R Brickston wrote:
On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 19:30:32 -0600, wrote:

Dear RB,

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...migrati on%22

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Someone must have taken at least one photo of this event. Please post.

Now you know I didn't make it up. I thought it was strange behavior for
spiders who normally fight for territory. In the march over my legs they
were only about 6" apart from each other. I guess they were focused on
their mission of marching.
Nature is fun to participate with, and not just watch Animal Planet.
Bill Baka

On Tue, 05 Jun 2007 02:51:54 GMT, Bill wrote:

wrote:
On Sun, 03 Jun 2007 01:13:09 -0600, wrote:

[snip]

Finally, here's about ten pounds of expectant mother, a bit bigger
than a bike helmet. Inflamed by a thunderstorm, she foolishly dug a
nest this afternoon at the edge of a sandy but poorly drained two-rut
road, fifteen feet from her marsh:
http://i12.tinypic.com/6gxpi1g.jpg

Tails are often broken or truncated, but this tail is pristine, ready
for the show ring. (Yes, I once kept them as pets, but no, there are
no formal best-of-show competitions.)
http://i13.tinypic.com/4zvf9nb.jpg

Excellent shell, little moss, no leeches, no holes:
http://i17.tinypic.com/6434ia9.jpg

The tail has been moved to one side to show to advantage, while the
eye catches the camera flash:
http://i8.tinypic.com/5y9huds.jpg

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Snapping turtles don't bask much, but they often float far out on a
nearby pond, so this evening I was looking for the tell-tale shell and
head just barely above the water.

Alas, I saw nothing but ducks and geese.

However, part of a cottonwood log covered with dry gray bark was
sticking up out of the water in a nearby narrow channel.

After watching the log for a while, I climbed a convenient tree and
took some pictures of the log, which was close to three feet long from
the tip of its nose to the end of its tail:

http://i9.tinypic.com/5xzxetu.jpg

You can see that my Tarzan act has disturbed the log, which has raised
its head and is ready to deal with any irritating ducklings that come
too close. The two bottles give some idea of the size of the log, most
of which is below the waterline. Judging by the logs that I kept as
pets, this one is easily over twenty pounds.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Looking at the apparent size of the 'log' I can tell I would not want to
mess with it. I picked some up on interstate 40 in Oklahoma to put them
out of harm's way and they did their level best to bite me. I tried the
pencil test since I had one in the car and the test turtle bit it clean
in half. Feisty little buggers.
Bill Baka

Dear Bill,

Usually, the claim is a broomstick.

In practical tests, even large common snappers were barely able to
break a pencil. This is unsurprising, since they don't eat sticks or
gnaw bones.

The tell-tale sign of the myth is that the stick/pencil/broom-handle
is always bitten in _half_, which is impossible.

A turtle's beak would have to divide any stick into _three_ pieces,
leaving the middle section hopelessly wedged in the lower beak. No one
ever mentions having to remove the chunk of wood stuck in the turtle's
mouth.

A large common snapper's head is about the size of a big fist--and all
the jaw muscles are right there on the side of the skull, not lurking
up the elbow.

Common snappers are chiefly bottom-dwelling carrion feeders, but will
grab live crayfish, frogs, ducklings, small snakes, and unwary fish.

If you keep common snappers as pets, you learn that they seize freshly
killed bullfrogs with their beaks and then tear them to pieces with
their powerful clawed forelegs. My largest pet was a plump 28-pound
female. She couldn't bite through a bullfrog leg, but she could rip
the amphibians in half with her claws and gulp them down.

A foolish claim is floating around the internet about snapping turtles
having thousand-pound bites. Possibly someone was thinking of a 150-lb
alligator snapper, an entirely different beast than a common snapper,
which is huge in the wild at 40 pounds.

(The record weight for a wild common snapper was a 68-lb Nebraskan,
much to the embarrassment of certain Southern states. The commonly
cited 86-lb common snapper was a huge, overfed captive, which was kept
in a swill barrel and bore about as much resemblance to a normal
snapper as Chalo does to a typical RBT poster.)

Here's a fair example of a wild snapper record:
http://www.kdwp.state.ks.us/news/lay...pping_tu rtle

And another state wild record:
http://www.bio.davidson.edu/people/m.../bigturtle.htm

(It's not uncommon to catch two snappers in the same trap like the
North Carolina giant and his little friend. You bait a simple box trap
with liver scraps, and the snappers follow the scent through the
water. I once had a hell of a time getting a pair of 18-pound males
out of a large box-trap that I'd foolishly built when I expected only
a single 10-lb snapper if I was lucky.)

Here's a pdf with some details about record weights:
http://wfs.sdstate.edu/wfsdept/Publi...0M.S.-1968.pdf

"What perhaps makes chelydrids most interesting is what they eat, or
at least what they bite. ‘Large individuals are known to have caused
injury to people unwary enough to step into or swim in the water near
them, and they are quite capable of removing a toe or finger if given
the opportunity’ (Alderton 1988, p. 112). Indeed, they are anecdotally
credited with being able to ‘bite through a broom handle’. For his
excellent TV series ‘O’Shea’s Dangerous Reptiles’, Mark O’Shea decided
to test this dubious assertion. With the help of a colleague he caught
the largest and nastiest alligator snappers he could, ****ed them off
by poking them, and then ****ed them off some more by shoving a broom
handle into their mouths. All the turtles bit happily, and bit hard.
And as impressive as it was, sad to say not one turtle was powerful
enough to cleave neatly through 25 thick mm of solid wood, which to be
honest isn’t much of a surprise."

"Rather more rigorous tests were applied by Herrel et al. (2002) who
tested the bite force of numerous diverse turtles, including both
snappers and alligator snappers. They found snappers to have bite
forces of between 208 and 226 Newtons, and alligator snappers of
between 158 and 176 N."

http://darrennaish.blogspot.com/2006...ite-lunge.html

Here's the scholarly Herrel et al. article mentioned above, with
enough graphs to please Robert Chung and an early table of bite forces
for a variety of turtles, with a common snapper (chelydra serpentina)
6th on the awkwardly rotated alphabetical list:

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi...1.2002.00459.x

The roughly 10-lb common snapper managed a bite force of 209 Newtons,
or about 47 pounds, only 5% of the wild thousand-pound claims. Most
RBT posters can break a hundred pounds.

You do not, however, want to let even a baby snapper with a 2-inch
shell get its jaws on your finger, whose flesh is considerably easier
to damage than a pencil and much more sensitive. (Guess how I know.)

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

wrote:
On Tue, 05 Jun 2007 02:51:54 GMT, Bill wrote:

wrote:
On Sun, 03 Jun 2007 01:13:09 -0600, wrote:

[snip]

Finally, here's about ten pounds of expectant mother, a bit bigger
than a bike helmet. Inflamed by a thunderstorm, she foolishly dug a
nest this afternoon at the edge of a sandy but poorly drained two-rut
road, fifteen feet from her marsh:
http://i12.tinypic.com/6gxpi1g.jpg

Tails are often broken or truncated, but this tail is pristine, ready
for the show ring. (Yes, I once kept them as pets, but no, there are
no formal best-of-show competitions.)
http://i13.tinypic.com/4zvf9nb.jpg

Excellent shell, little moss, no leeches, no holes:
http://i17.tinypic.com/6434ia9.jpg

The tail has been moved to one side to show to advantage, while the
eye catches the camera flash:
http://i8.tinypic.com/5y9huds.jpg

Cheers,

Carl Fogel
Snapping turtles don't bask much, but they often float far out on a
nearby pond, so this evening I was looking for the tell-tale shell and
head just barely above the water.

Alas, I saw nothing but ducks and geese.

However, part of a cottonwood log covered with dry gray bark was
sticking up out of the water in a nearby narrow channel.

After watching the log for a while, I climbed a convenient tree and
took some pictures of the log, which was close to three feet long from
the tip of its nose to the end of its tail:

http://i9.tinypic.com/5xzxetu.jpg

You can see that my Tarzan act has disturbed the log, which has raised
its head and is ready to deal with any irritating ducklings that come
too close. The two bottles give some idea of the size of the log, most
of which is below the waterline. Judging by the logs that I kept as
pets, this one is easily over twenty pounds.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel
Looking at the apparent size of the 'log' I can tell I would not want to
mess with it. I picked some up on interstate 40 in Oklahoma to put them
out of harm's way and they did their level best to bite me. I tried the
pencil test since I had one in the car and the test turtle bit it clean
in half. Feisty little buggers.
Bill Baka

Dear Bill,

Usually, the claim is a broomstick.

In practical tests, even large common snappers were barely able to
break a pencil. This is unsurprising, since they don't eat sticks or
gnaw bones.

The tell-tale sign of the myth is that the stick/pencil/broom-handle
is always bitten in _half_, which is impossible.

A turtle's beak would have to divide any stick into _three_ pieces,
leaving the middle section hopelessly wedged in the lower beak. No one
ever mentions having to remove the chunk of wood stuck in the turtle's
mouth.

A large common snapper's head is about the size of a big fist--and all
the jaw muscles are right there on the side of the skull, not lurking
up the elbow.

Common snappers are chiefly bottom-dwelling carrion feeders, but will
grab live crayfish, frogs, ducklings, small snakes, and unwary fish.

If you keep common snappers as pets, you learn that they seize freshly
killed bullfrogs with their beaks and then tear them to pieces with
their powerful clawed forelegs. My largest pet was a plump 28-pound
female. She couldn't bite through a bullfrog leg, but she could rip
the amphibians in half with her claws and gulp them down.

A foolish claim is floating around the internet about snapping turtles
having thousand-pound bites. Possibly someone was thinking of a 150-lb
alligator snapper, an entirely different beast than a common snapper,
which is huge in the wild at 40 pounds.

(The record weight for a wild common snapper was a 68-lb Nebraskan,
much to the embarrassment of certain Southern states. The commonly
cited 86-lb common snapper was a huge, overfed captive, which was kept
in a swill barrel and bore about as much resemblance to a normal
snapper as Chalo does to a typical RBT poster.)

Here's a fair example of a wild snapper record:
http://www.kdwp.state.ks.us/news/lay...pping_tu rtle

And another state wild record:
http://www.bio.davidson.edu/people/m.../bigturtle.htm

(It's not uncommon to catch two snappers in the same trap like the
North Carolina giant and his little friend. You bait a simple box trap
with liver scraps, and the snappers follow the scent through the
water. I once had a hell of a time getting a pair of 18-pound males
out of a large box-trap that I'd foolishly built when I expected only
a single 10-lb snapper if I was lucky.)

Here's a pdf with some details about record weights:
http://wfs.sdstate.edu/wfsdept/Publi...0M.S.-1968.pdf

"What perhaps makes chelydrids most interesting is what they eat, or
at least what they bite. ‘Large individuals are known to have caused
injury to people unwary enough to step into or swim in the water near
them, and they are quite capable of removing a toe or finger if given
the opportunity’ (Alderton 1988, p. 112). Indeed, they are anecdotally
credited with being able to ‘bite through a broom handle’. For his
excellent TV series ‘O’Shea’s Dangerous Reptiles’, Mark O’Shea decided
to test this dubious assertion. With the help of a colleague he caught
the largest and nastiest alligator snappers he could, ****ed them off
by poking them, and then ****ed them off some more by shoving a broom
handle into their mouths. All the turtles bit happily, and bit hard.
And as impressive as it was, sad to say not one turtle was powerful
enough to cleave neatly through 25 thick mm of solid wood, which to be
honest isn’t much of a surprise."

"Rather more rigorous tests were applied by Herrel et al. (2002) who
tested the bite force of numerous diverse turtles, including both
snappers and alligator snappers. They found snappers to have bite
forces of between 208 and 226 Newtons, and alligator snappers of
between 158 and 176 N."

http://darrennaish.blogspot.com/2006...ite-lunge.html

Here's the scholarly Herrel et al. article mentioned above, with
enough graphs to please Robert Chung and an early table of bite forces
for a variety of turtles, with a common snapper (chelydra serpentina)
6th on the awkwardly rotated alphabetical list:

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi...1.2002.00459.x

The roughly 10-lb common snapper managed a bite force of 209 Newtons,
or about 47 pounds, only 5% of the wild thousand-pound claims. Most
RBT posters can break a hundred pounds.

You do not, however, want to let even a baby snapper with a 2-inch
shell get its jaws on your finger, whose flesh is considerably easier
to damage than a pencil and much more sensitive. (Guess how I know.)

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Interesting stuff. I forwarded this to myself so I can look it all up.
Saying the turtle bit the pencil 'clean' in half was a bit of
overstatement, but I still had a broken pencil, so I wasn't about to get
my fingers near his mouth. The ones I tried to move off the freeway were
in the 5 to 10 pound range, so no spectacular whoppers in that bunch.
Still the number of flat turtles on the road was a grim testament to the
fact that cars trump shells.
If you got bit as you say that kind of means you tried keeping one as a
pet, and I had a baby alligator who would bite my finger but not draw
blood. The alligator would not let go and I could pick him up while he
was clamped to my finger. I would not want to try that with a snapping
turtle.
Good day.
Bill Baka

On Sun, 03 Jun 2007 01:13:09 -0600, wrote:

Something always goofs up my pictures of great blue herons.

Yesterday, a flock of idiots rafting down the river on inner tubes
began waving, splashing, and yelling, "Hey, mister, look at that big
duck!" as I tried to get my camera out of the bag with a heron
standing only fifty feet away:

http://i13.tinypic.com/54eccjn.jpg

By the time I pushed the button, the bird was a few hundred yards
upstream toward the dam. Those power cables hang across a mile-wide
valley.

Today, I stopped, got the camera out with my back to another heron,
fumbled the switches to get the camera ready, and was just turning to
take a picture when a recumbent--one of the four bicycles that I saw
in fifteen miles--pedalled past and spooked the bird.

By sheer luck, the camera caught a glimpse of the heron through the
chain-link fence:

http://i8.tinypic.com/5y7j8cg.jpg

Apart from the chain-link fence, that setting looks almost natural,
doesn't it?

Regrettably, the heron landed further down the beach and posed,
letting me stick the camera's snout through the fence and capture the
truly hideous nature of the pond:

http://i19.tinypic.com/6ewmk43.jpg

Some claim that the odd circles on the pond are caused by drops of
water falling from the sky, but there is little evidence to support
this strange belief.

I'll spare you the sight of the almost always unused three-story blue
waterslide to the left of that hideous artificial beach. What a
fenced-off and usually abandoned watersport park with its pedal-boats
and enormous empty parking lot is doing in the middle of nowhere in a
state park is as much a mystery as those odd circles in the pond.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

wrote:
On Sun, 03 Jun 2007 01:13:09 -0600, wrote:

Something always goofs up my pictures of great blue herons.

Yesterday, a flock of idiots rafting down the river on inner tubes
began waving, splashing, and yelling, "Hey, mister, look at that big
duck!" as I tried to get my camera out of the bag with a heron
standing only fifty feet away:

http://i13.tinypic.com/54eccjn.jpg

By the time I pushed the button, the bird was a few hundred yards
upstream toward the dam. Those power cables hang across a mile-wide
valley.

Today, I stopped, got the camera out with my back to another heron,
fumbled the switches to get the camera ready, and was just turning to
take a picture when a recumbent--one of the four bicycles that I saw
in fifteen miles--pedalled past and spooked the bird.

By sheer luck, the camera caught a glimpse of the heron through the
chain-link fence:

http://i8.tinypic.com/5y7j8cg.jpg

Apart from the chain-link fence, that setting looks almost natural,
doesn't it?

Regrettably, the heron landed further down the beach and posed,
letting me stick the camera's snout through the fence and capture the
truly hideous nature of the pond:

http://i19.tinypic.com/6ewmk43.jpg

Some claim that the odd circles on the pond are caused by drops of
water falling from the sky, but there is little evidence to support
this strange belief.

I'll spare you the sight of the almost always unused three-story blue
waterslide to the left of that hideous artificial beach. What a
fenced-off and usually abandoned watersport park with its pedal-boats
and enormous empty parking lot is doing in the middle of nowhere in a
state park is as much a mystery as those odd circles in the pond.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

I can relate to your problems. My first digital camera had a horrendous
boot time and shutter delay which cost me many fine shots. Now I carry
my 35mm Minolta and a bag of lenses but still have to get it focused and
set the exposure for the shot..
Maybe I'll just take all my lunch money for the year and buy an
overpriced super digital, which will be old news by next year.
It ain't easy riding AND taking pictures.
Bill Baka