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Mar212020

Just Some Butters to Brighten Your Day

So last post I tried to cheer up the world with some cute furries and a few of their friends.  Not sure it worked, but hell it was worth a try.  Things are going from bad to worse here as our tax evading governor has now put my state on lockdown scheduled to begin tomorrow at 5pm or so.  All non-essential establishments shuttered.  This resulted in a quick run to our  local grocery store to pick up a few essentials to make it through the next couple of weeks.  As I watched the metal shelves slowly reveal themselves I could only think back to my high school days in the retail industry 5- 11pm during the week and 8s on the weekends.  Those days were hard enough, yet nothing like what these workers were having to go through now.  I also thought about my blogger friend across the pond going through the exact same chaos.  So, thought I’d dedicate today’s post to B over at Butterflies to Dragsters.

First off a warning – if you want good shots, got to B’s site.  I suck at these winged missiles and my rig really isn’t set up to get the detail they deserve.  Not to mention keeping The Beast sighted on these unpredictable Butters will put a serious hurt on the arms.  Secondly, you’d think these beauties would be easy to identify – unique patterns, varying color profiles, how hard can it be… answer damn hard. Eventually got what I thought were some close reference pictures and went with it – thank god for DuckDuckGo.

Okay, here we go…

Butterfly from Minnesota Trip July 2017

Found this specimen on our trip up to Minnesota back in July 2017.  Birding happened to be a little thin where we were at so I went looking for some other targets.  There were tons of these Butters hanging out in the parking lot.  I would spot a particularly colorful one, get the glass on it.. shuffle back to get it into focus range and press… well, start to press the shutter when it would take off.  Time after time they did this to me. Finally got one or two in the tin and then decided I needed to get a shot of it fully open.  Must have been quite the comedy routine for Linda as I ran around trying to get one to stay around long enough and willing to fold its wings down.

Butterfly from Minnesota Trip July 2017

Hit the jump to see a few more average shots of beautiful creatures.

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Jun092019

Featherless

Greetings Intrigued fans.  This was a pretty busy weekend as we headed up north for a little fun in the sun and, of course, a bit of agility dog showing.  Linda decided she wanted to ignore the advice of her heart specialist and get a few agility runs in with Raven.  He needed one more successful standard run to move to the next competition level.  She promised to take it easy in the ring so I relented and agreed to it.  Should probably mentioned she did bribe me with the opportunity to get some trail running training in (their trails were not flooded out like our local ones are) and the cherry on top, a day of birding with Ron and his wife.  Raven ended up getting it done in the ring going 3 for 4 while Linda managed to keep her heart under control.  I managed to get a solid 13 miles in putting me in good position for next week’s 15K considered Illinois’ toughest, but reminded me just how hard the 50K is going to be a few weeks later.  Still a bit sore from yesterday’s run, was still able to get a solid day of birding in – think we came in at the high 30’s species mark for the day.  Once all that was out of the way, we had to race home to watch the St Louis Blues try to claim the Stanley Cup.  One frustrating element was the lack of Internet where we were camping arrrrrgggghhhh!  Had plans to get caught up on my running post – nope.  While sitting here watching the Blues (now down 2 goals) thought I’d jump on the computer and crank out a quick post.

It’s a bittersweet post today as this officially wraps up all the worthy shots from the Georgia birding trip back in May 2015.  With all the bird shots out of the way, it is time to give some time those non-feathered creatures hanging out in the region.  Before I begin though, if you are looking for good shots of dragons and butters you should leave this post immediately and head on over to see B’s work over at Butterflies to Dragsters (link here).  I’m a bit embarrassed to even put these out after seeing his work behind the macro.  So, if you are still here, let’s get to some non-birds shall we.

Georgia May 2015 finds

Hit the jump to see the last shots from the Georgia trip.

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Apr242016

Fragile Wings

Why don’t we just put a put a bow on this non-bird month.  Just sitting here taking a quick break to recover from my morning run.  As you know if you read this blog, just sitting around doing nothing isn’t one of my favorite things to do – seems wasteful when there’s so many pictures in the queue!  How about we sit here and recover from my morning run while cranking out a post – ahhh, much better.

Today we feature a creature that has a similar characteristic with birds.. albeit a much more fragile version.
Butterfly Set

That’s right, today we are featuring butterflies.  This generally means one thing to me – outings where I didn’t find any birds, dragonflies or frogs.  That is usually my progression out in the field.  After that you get spiders, insects and last resort a worm.  This particular butterfly is called an Orange Sulphur and was shot in Champaign IL.

Butterfly Set

Hit the jump to see a couple more butterfly specimens!

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