With the return of a large brown black bear, I managed a good shot of it looking in my direction. A striking thing about it were the crests of the shoulder and hip humps. With black bears, hips are higher than shoulders, and this is obvious here.
Of course, with grizzlies, back height is the other way around: shoulders are higher than the hips.
A large black bear looks, just before it vanished.
After seeing my first bear two days ago, I saw another yesterday. At first I thought it was the same bear, but this one did not have a white blaze on its chest while the last one did.
The black bear climbed a Douglas-fir tree and was eating Saskatoon berries.
It made a final pause to look in my direction before vanishing.
This is the first bear I have seen this year and it is already mid July.
A large, black bear was exploring my property looking for food. It stopped for a moment when it discovered it was being watched. He looked to be in good shape, but had received a minor scuffing of its fur on the left flank.
This black bear is brown.
Yesterday morning, I watched both an osprey eating a fish and a heron flying. Each bird is rather large, having wing spans of over about 1.8 meters.
An (likely a male) Osprey finishes eating a fish at the tail.
A Great Blue Heron is beginning to gain its breeding plumage.
Three of us went early Sunday morning to watch a nearby Osprey nest. We were rewarded by seeing the male bring in a large fish, and the appearance of a chick.
The male Osprey delivers the first fish of the day to his partner and unseen chick.
The female ravenously feeds herself and the chick while the male keeps watch. As far as we can tell, there is only one chick in this family. Photo by Cynthia.
When the female and chick have had a feast, the male flies of with the remains of the fish to eat it on a nearby piling. Photo by Dorothy.
I have seen a few white-tailed fawns, but this has got to be the smallest, and thus youngest, of that small group.
A mother white-tailed deer attends to her small fawn.
When the male Osprey has a partner and (unseen) chicks in the nest, he becomes the sole provider of fish. Yet, when he catches a fish, he often will stop and eat the tasty head before delivering the remains to the nest.
A male osprey has stopped on his way to the nest and has eaten the tasty head.
He then takes the rest of the fish to the nest.
After taking the fish to the nest and feeding his family, this male flew off with the leftovers to eat by himself. His partner is leaning over and tending the unseen chicks.
A female Osprey sat for some time in the rain on a piling as it watched the water below for fish. It finally gave up and prepared to leave. It pooped and (what I had not seen before) flapped its wings to shake off their accumulated rain water. She then flew off.
It just isn’t clear to me what the osprey is doing differently with its wings. In each case it flapped them, but in the first case it did not lift off, in the second case it did.
The osprey stands on the piling and flaps its wings to clear them of the rain water.
The osprey flaps its wings and flies off.
I was looking for a crab spider eating on a daisy. I didn’t find one.
Instead, I found a yellow velvet beetle mating. Well, the bug is also known as the golden flower longhorn beetle, and also the golden-haired flower longhorn. Ah, the ambiguity of the naming of bugs. At least the scientific name, Lepturobosca chrysocama is fixed.
A shot of the flower beetle was seen as I walked up past the daisies.
When I walked down again past the daisies, there were two of them positioning to mate.
They then mated. They were fast and it was all over in about 1/8 of a second. The speed of the event meant that there wasn’t time to get an accurate focus. Fun, nevertheless.
What a difference one letter can make. Earlier this week, a mouse was posted here; later that day, we watched a moose. There is a remarkable difference in switching the u f0r the o. The mouse is tiny, the moose is huge. Indeed, the moose is about 30,000 times heavier than the mouse.
A moose is distinctly uncommon around here and to see one walk close by was a treat. Photo by Cynthia Fraser.
The moose went for a swim and briefly turned our way. This enabled us to more easily see the spread of its beginning antlers still coated in velvet. Remarkably, moose antlers can grow up to 2.5 cm (1 inch) daily during June and July. Photo by Finn Grathwol.
The moose climbed out of the water and vanished to the upland forest.
