While on land, penguins are rather clumsy and funny, but underwater they turn into graceful hunters, flying through their adapted medium.
While on land, penguins are rather clumsy and funny, but underwater they turn into graceful hunters, flying through their adapted medium.
Everywhere a nut, nut!! This year has been extremely generous in the nut department, but knowing the distribution schedule, we’ll be out by christmas.
And also, as mentioned previously, the world’s giantest squirrel diligently seeking out those nuts causes a certain percentage loss per windy day. More on that later… Have some nuts!

The first nuts! They are now about two weeks old. Or would be, if we hadn’t et them. ©rq, all rights reserved.
The sun has come out of hiding and it’s a lovely autumn day. Just warm enough that you don’t need a jacket, but still cool enough that Jack wants to frolic. I’ve been playing with my camera and the scratches don’t seem to impact my photos too badly. That means that I can take some time before I buy a new lens. This is good news because at the moment my money has more important things to do. Jack will be needing surgery soon to remove a lipoma (fatty cyst) on his right elbow. It’s grown to the size of a baseball and we’d like to have it removed before the snow starts to fly. The surgery is planned for Halloween, which can be winter-like around here so let’s hope autumn decides to stick around for a while.
I love gorillas and I will not apologise for the amount of pics I took. You get 17 of them, most below the fold.
The little one told us to surprise her with a party for her birthday later this month. I decided to go for a party “Under the Sea” and I want to make a special cake with a “mirror glaze” frosting. Mirror glaze is a special type of frosting which is, you may guess it, very smooth and shiny. Since I’ve never done this before I decided to make a cake for Mr’s birthday last Sunday and try it out, since he can cope with “delicious cake that looks like roadkill”, just in case that things don’t work as they should, but they did.
Actually it turned into two cakes, because I had too much batter for my pan, so he got a galaxy cake with a strawberry cardamom filling and a Ferrero Rocher cake.
For a “how to”, click below the fold
The finalists of the 2018 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards are out, and they’re a blast. Here’s a couple of my favourites:

© Achim Sterna/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2018

© Mary McGowan/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2018

© Roie Galitz/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2018

© Kallol Mukherjee/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2018
And lots more…
Today’s piece of music is more of a dance showcase, in the theme of colourful animals. Below the fold because spiders.
It’s another damp and dreary day around here and the weather forecast is for more of the same for days ahead. There wasn’t even moody fog today, just dull skies and soggy ground. Even worse, I tripped and dropped my camera and scratched the lens. The camera seems to be working fine, but for the next while my pictures may have a bit of scarring. I’ve been thinking about getting a better lens and perhaps this is the universe’s way of telling me not to wait any longer. In fact, it might just be time for an early Christmas/Festivus present for voyager. I’ll see how bad the damage is over the next few days and if it’s only minor I may try and wait. I think I might need to save a few more pennies to get the quality I want. I’m using a Canon T5i with an EFS 18 – 135mm lens. Any suggestions?
Obviously inspired by Nightjar. My first experiments with the “flash at dusk” technique. Cropped for composition in PC, because I did not have macro lens with me and I could not zoom as much as I would like.
The trees are doing something odd out in northern Ontario:
In the forests of northern Ontario, a “strange phenomenon” of large natural rings occurs, where thousands of circles, as large as two kilometers in diameter, appear in the remote landscape.
Via this link: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Aerial-photograph-of-forest-rings-with-diameters-of-approximately-150-m-in-northern_fig1_292337890, which leads to a very scientific article on the phenomenon.
The article assures us that this is nothing unnatural or particularly mysterious:
Indeed, as geochemist Stew Hamilton suggested in 1998, the rings are most likely to be surface features caused by “reduced chimneys,” or “big centres of negative charge that frequently occur over metal deposits,” where a forest ring is simply “a special case of a reduced chimney.”
Reduced chimneys, meanwhile, are “giant electrochemical cells” in the ground that, as seen through the example of forest rings, can affect the way vegetation grows there.
I’ve been out there and it looked fine to me, but things get even weirder and weirder the more I read – but that just might be the full article going in all kinds of directions, especially at the end. But the tree rings are cool. And maybe it’s aliens…
