Oh Deer!

Last Saturday I decided it was high time to give my new wide angle lens a try over at the daffodil field at Mill Creek Park.  But contrary to my initial plans, using the new lens was not the most exciting part of this photo adventure.







After I gave up trying to fight the bright beaming late afternoon sun and all the shadows that come with it, I put my workhorse 28mm-300mm zoom lens back on my D90 and decided to just enjoy the regular walking path.  While stopped looking at the trail head bulletin board a couple walking by stopped and told us they had just seen a few deer on the path about a quarter mile down.  Of course I practically took off at a sprint.....but after speed walking and scanning the forest along the creek I spied no deer.

 But the creek looked sparkling and gorgeous as it ambled through the carpet of green grass and I saw a worn down footpath off the paved walkway so I clambered down the embankment picking up speed as I did...pausing and shouting back to my #1 assistant who was following me.  As I turned to look back, my trusty assistant grabs my shoulder and turns me almost face to face with four deer!!!  Of course they were beginning to move away as my bull in a china shop behavior is in no way conducive to sneaking up to wild subjects.  But their tails were down, and they were moving slow enough that we could follow.....so we trailed them along their beaten down path. 

How many deer do you see?  Hope you said three!

  




I didn't get the awesome perfect photo that I would have wanted....but it was my own fault!!  However tracking those deer through the picture perfect setting as people shouting and strolled at the top of the embankment on the main walkway was still thrilling, fun, and oddly soothing.

Tracks of my Deers

 Another fun highlight after the deer got too far away, on the way back I heard some quacking and looked to find a lovely mallard drake cruising along the creek.  He swam along quacking intermittently and then hopped up onto a rock near a spillway and to preen after a few quick dunks in the water!  Fun to see that happen in the wild for real instead of in a city park next to a football field.

All in all a nice kick off to the spring photo season.  I hope to have more posts as I get out there enjoying the great outdoors!

Deer path

If I was a deer I would want to live here!

BuffleHeads!

As any regular reader on this blog knows by now...I love photographing birds!!  The Lord made these beautiful delicate looking creatures so hardy and so lovely it is hard not to think that all Christians must be birdwatchers!

This past spring we had some passing visitors on our pond.  I spent over half an hour crouched on our dock trying to get good shots of these small seabirds that stopped by on their way back to Alaska and Canada.  They are Buffleheads!  For some reason I never got around to posting these shots, so I decided to share them now as a nod to all our migrating feathered friends....and maybe those of us who wish we could fly south for a warmer winter too!

Buffleheads have a high metabolism so they are very active and great for birdwatching!

This guy was floating to the surface after a dive.  It is the most interesting thing to watch!  They dive down deep and then you have to wait a while for them to resurface...and when they do they raise so slow and steady it is almost like they are on an little elevator.  It is really cool and the one thing I can't convey in still photography!  But I did my best in the shots  below to catch them while diving to eat. 

Dive! Dive!

Usually one in the group stays on the surface to stand guard

Tiptoe through the Tulips

 Two weekends ago was a much awaited spring thrill for me....tulip time!!!  This smorgasbord of photos is just a small fraction of the hundreds of frames I shot at the Fellows Riverside Rose Garden at Mill Creek Park.

It was sunny, a tad warm in the sun, a little chilly in the breeze, but overall a nice afternoon of tulip gawking.


 




The smooth delicate petals, the bright colors, all a magnificent display of God's handiwork in my most favorite kind of flower!  So I beg you pardon for the superfluous pictures in this post but it was the least I could share!

Also, I could not find a reading long enough for this post, so I decided since a picture was worth a thousand words, I would just let the pictures of God's creation do the talking this time.  So enjoy!

What is YOUR favorite color tulip?  There are so many varieties, it is hard to choose.  Put a comment below and tell us the best color tulip you have ever seen....both in the garden and in a vase.  (I love to see them anywhere!)

  

Close Up

Baby Shower

Who doesn't love babies?!  I think that most anything looks super cute as a baby....people, animals....you say baby and I am there!

Last weekend Mill Creek Metro Park Farm held their annual Baby Shower for all their newborn barnyard animals.  It is always a great hands on learning experience for the kids in my family....and now I am addicted to going with my camera...whether I have kids in tow or not!!  (Sometimes it is best to act your shoe size and not your age....sorry Dad!  But some things in life bring out the kid in all of us, make us smile, and laugh.....and what adult doesn't need to do that more often!)

 

I thought I would share some of these cute little critters today, but also a special reading that I have been saving for a looooong time. 

 

 For all the pictures and excerpts I have posted on this blog, there is one thing that really cannot be conveyed in the photos.  I thought since this is Easter weekend, this would be the perfect time to pair this reading with some random photos of God's Creation, and remind us all of one thing that is needful.

 

From Octavius Winslow (1808-1878)

“Morning Thoughts”

"God is love" was the great truth Jesus came to make known. Hence God's love is clearly a revelation to man, rather than a discovery by man. Divine love was the last perfection of Deity to baffle the research of human wisdom. Other attributes might be dimly traced in creation. Some faint glimmerings of God's wisdom, power, and goodness might be seen in the "things which are made;" but how God could love sinners, could redeem and save sinners, was a question to which nature's oracle returned no response. 

 

In the exercise of the vast powers with which his Creator has endowed him, man may discover everything, but this. He sweeps the firmament above him with his telescope, and a new constellation of surpassing glory arises before his view. He delves into the earth beneath him, and an ancient and long-lost city is untombed. He works a problem, and science develops some new and startling wonder. But there is one discovery he cannot make–one wonder surpassing all wonders, the most marvelous and stupendous, he cannot unravel. Nature, aiding him in all other researches, affords him no clue to this. 

Early blooming tulip!  Look at that color!

The sunbeam paints it not upon the brilliant cloud; the glacier reflects it not from its dazzling brow; the valley's stream murmurs it not in its gentle music; it thunders not in the roar of ocean's billow; it sighs not in the evening's zephyr; it exhales not the opening flower; all nature is profoundly silent upon a theme so divine and strange, so vast and tender, as God's redeeming love to man.

So enjoy scrolling through the rest of these pics, but remember that for all the photos posted and all the wonder we see when we look at nature....the most amazing piece of information is still concealed only in God's Word.  Only when we pick up and read our Bibles will we discover God's love toward man, His payment to redeem His elect people, and the true glory of God.