If you would like to take an occasional side road
littered with meditations, poetry, musings and photography,
try my morningpsalms web site.
The site was first published in 2002.
For various and sundry reasons,
see http://www.morningpsalms.com/wandered-home-again-essay, I let the site languish.
I have returned to posting my musings.
That’s Godiva in the photo, hunting at Jordan Lake yesterday.
Ospreys go south for the winter, some go all the way to South America.
The adults leave first in the fall and then the fledgling females.
The young male ospreys are the last to leave the lake.
I caught this fledgling, hatched this year, fishing at the lake this morning.
With the freeze projected for tonight he may too be gone tomorrow.
Note his still orange fledgling eye and the white edging to his flight feathers – marks of a youngster.
The peregrine falcon was up early chasing breakfast.
He made several extremely fast dashes but I didn’t see him catch anything.
Here he is coming back to a snappy landing at the end of a dash.
There is a short slide show of the strike at https://flic.kr/p/NBRVmq
THE fastest land or sea animal on earth, the peregrine falcon.
The peregrine is not common here in central NC.
But this morning, I got the thrill of watching one swiftly wing past me.
In a stoop, a hunting dive, the peregrine can reach 200 mph! Oh, my, speed indeed.
I was visiting Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh, NC, looking to photograph the fall flowers.
A butterfly bush (yes that is its name) caught my attention
as the skippers, cabbage and sulfur butterflies flitted about…
and a single, glowing, male monarch butterfly.
Oh, wow, I thought that all of them had already left for Mexico, their winter home.
doc ellen's journey 