a little wild   (a small slice of wildlife)

A very mild winter so far, so not a lot of snowy photographs!  I needed to catch some crystals before they vanished.

Lots of snow recently.  I took my son and his friends sledding, and took some photos of the nearby snow when I had a quick chance.

First, some photos from Christmas Day.  We didn’t have a white Christmas, but we did have a nice frost covering the lawn.  And at that time of day, I was able to lie down on the ground and take photos into the sun, setting aglow the rime.

Today (December 30th) we had a light snowfall.  I went to Devil’s Rock to see what I could see.  Snow on the moss was the main theme of today’s walk.

My first time on the Pepperbush trail at Moose Hill.  A closeup of beech bark (maybe birch?), in the late evening slanting light.

We had a meeting of the New England Entomological Society at Broad Meadow Brook.  I’ve never been there before, and took the opportunity to take a walk in the woods there.

The autumn colors are gone.  The scenic snowy landscapes are not yet.  This is the brown season, and it has pleasures that are smaller and more intimate.

An abstract of some bright leaves, taken facing into the sun.

An insect that drove me absolutely crazy by flying away each time I thought I had it in my sights.  Identified as Dikrella cruentata, a first for me for this particular type of leafhopper, and apparently the second recorded sighting in Massachusetts as per bugguide.net, and the first recording for this insect in Massachusetts in November (this information courtesy the Insects of New England Facebook group).  Eratoneura was also proposed as the genus.  This is the best I could do:

A nice walk to get my mind off the elections coming up.  The bright autumn colors did not stay long this year, but the more subtle late autumn hues are beautiful, too.  I think cloudy skies bring out the colors wonderfully.

A surprisingly warm day for this time of year, so the insect activity may have been a bit more than normal.  This one had an intriguing flight, almost like a beetle, and I haven’t been able to identify it yet [edit: identified on Facebook as a March fly, Penthetria heteroptera, but perhaps also a dark fungus gnat?].  Sorry for a poor photo:

This heron stood across the lake amidst some gorgeous autumn colors:

And finally, some flowers to celebrate the end of summer:

Taken with my cell phone on my walk to the train station this morning.  As far as I know, I didn’t apply any filter to it — the Impressionist effect simply comes from zooming in and a felicitous lack of pixels.

Iceland is a PAYFC kind of place (“Put Away Your Camera”).  There’s just so much beauty everywhere you look, how can you hope to capture it?  Where do you start, where do you stop, and how can you even try?  I did in fact put my camera away at times, because I didn’t want to look at the country through a viewfinder.

Here are my attempts, and they don’t do the place justice.  The first set is in Skogar, near the southern tip.

The trail actually went behind the waterfall:

These photos were also in Skogar, as we climbed the trail up Skogafoss and behind it:

The view from the top of the falls:

A photo from the bottom of the waterfall:

The next set of photos are from the trail to Solheimajokull glacier.

Photos from Dyrholaey, a rocky promontory on the southern coast:

On the drive from Skogar to Skaftafell, there were huge tracts of land that had been recently covered by volcanic activity, and the woolly fringe moss had just started establishing a foothold.

Foss a sidhu:

Early views of Skaftafell from the road:

The colors were nothing but spectacular, and I wonder how they change over the seasons.

Jokulsarlon was also amazing:

The famous blue icebergs lived up to their reputation:

Seeing and actually photographing a mink in the wild was a major highlight for me.

Ice lying on the beach:

In Vatnajokull National Park, we hiked from the Skaftafell Visitor’s Center to Svartifoss to Sjonarsker to Sel.

Svartifoss is beautiful, and the basalt columns near it set it off stunningly.

Sjona means view, I believe, and Sjonarsker lives up to this:

We had a great view of the sunlight through the clouds:

From Sel, we saw the range from blue sky to rain clouds to the rain falling:

Let’s end on a rainbow.