Clouded Sulphur (Colias philodice)

I went for a walk in the bosque around noon. There were lots and lots of Clouded Sulphur butterflies feeding on the purple wildflowers. A few Checkered Whites where also feeding among the Clouded Sulphurs. I saw one tiny Western Pygmy-Blue that liked tumbleweeds and grass for some reason. The Western Pygmy-Blue was so small that the auto focus through my 70-200mm lens could not see it. I had to switch to manual focus.

Checkered White (Pontia protodice)
 

Western Pygmy-Blue (Brephidium exile)
 

Little Owl perched on a tangled heart tree, watching the stars, chirping at jet lights as they clawed the sky.

Western Osprey (Pandion Falco [Rock Me Amadeus] haliaetus)
 

I was not the only one out surveying the damage done to the beaver dams yesterday.

Military Osprey (Bell Boeing [That's Why We're Here] V-22)

The beaver dam when it was first built in November 2017.

The Conservancy couldn't take it any longer, and after 11 months of leaving the beaver dam under the bridge we use to get to the bosque, they tore it out.  The Angry Beavers asked me to repost their video "Bite 'Em on the Old Shin Bone" as a reminder of the mean and heartless the Conservancy is. Their video and the lyrics are at the end of this post.

Beaver swimming for cover.

Bridge without a beaver dam under it, September 2018.

Bite 'Em On The Old Shin Bone

Bite ‘Em On The Old Shin Bone
The Angry Beavers and The Average White Boys
Music: Shel Silverstein
Lyrics: Timothy Price

Ha ha ha, I don't believe it
Hah! Don't touch it
Hey you going to tell them who we are?

Well We’re bucktoothed builders
We got golden slappers
We love to lay sticks in a row… (Sounds like beavers)
We build real beauty, dams to tell the truth
We cut ten thousand willows you know… (Yah! Right!)
Fish have all kinds of gills, and it’s kind of surreal
Then there’s the man we’ve never known
He’s shrill, yelling, bitchin’, when he blows up our kitchen 
Wanna bite him on the old shinbone

(Old Shinbone) Wanna bite him right through his cover
(Bone…) Gonna bite five chomps for my mother
(Bone…) Wanna chew off his smiling face
Bite him on the old shinbone (That’s a very good idea you know)

We watch two legged ladies on the ditch bank daily
They walkin in tight jeans
We got a poor old gray haired biologist
Who thinks we’re really keen
Now the conservancy men wanna blowup our homes
And our homes get really blown
Like the blow when they bitchin and blowin up our kitchens
Wanna bite them on the old shinbones

(Old Shinbone) Wanna bite him right through his cover
(Bone…) Gonna bite five chomps for my mother
(Bone…) Wanna chew off his smiling face
Bite him on the old shinbone

[Talking]
Hey, I know how
Beaver roll...

[Instrumental]

Oh that's really beautiful man!

We got a lot of little teeny blue scaled guppies
Don’t do anything all day
And there’s a genuine government guru
Who says dynamite's a better way
Build nice dams but the government guy
Doesn’t think we need a home
We keep building stronger, but their dynamite gets longer
And we bite em on old shinbones

(Old Shinbone) Wanna bite him right through his cover
(Bone…) Gonna bite five chomps for my mother
(Bone…) Wanna chew off his smiling face
Bite him on the old shinbone
Bite him on the old shinbone

Wanna bite him right through his cover
(Bone…) Gonna bite five chomps for my mother
(Bone…) Wanna chew off his smiling face
Bite him on the old shinbone
 

Najar looks sweet, innocent and playful but it's just a ruse to draw you in closer before she attacks. 

Najar is one of our smallest kitties, but she is super quick, and attacks from any position with a quick flurry of paws, claws and fangs, and then is back in position ready for another attach before her victims know what got them. We call her the Night Furry after Toothless in "How to Tame Your Dragon."

You probably missed the attack between photos. She faster than a camera's shutter.

Another slight position change between attacks.

A direct challenge.

Feigning distraction.

After that last round of attacks, Najar gets in a cat nap in her dragon lair. AKA makeup box lid.

Protecting her lair from the other kitties who want to steal it.

Feigning "feeling kind of sleepy now!"

"Getting a little close there Paparazzo!"

"Enemy cat starboard. Cut the clicks Paparazzo."

"Cats on the left. More cats on the right. Stupid Paprazzo straight ahead, and a mess of makeup stuff behind. If I go into a furry, you all will be sorry!"

I've been trying to get a panorama of Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and Venus in an arc across the night sky for several nights now. It seems to be when the moon is half full I get the right combination of darkness in the sky and illumination from the moon to get some detail in the trees and horizon so Camera Raw can match edges and stitch the panoramas together. The moon looks more like a star than the moon, but the moon is too bright to get a correct exposure of it and still see the planets and surroundings.  I've included two slightly different views from the levee (the second panorama is about 500 feet south of the first) with a duplicate of each image identifying the planets and the moon (I didn't really need to label the moon, but the images didn't look right without the moon labeled). Laurie is somewhere far ahead of me on the levee, as she kept walking while I stopped to take the photos. I also included a composite photo of the moon's phases from 9/11 to 9/15. For whatever reason, that I don't remember, I did not get a photo of the moon on 9/12.

Moon on 9/11, 9/13, 9/14 and 9/15.

A Thread-Waisted Wasp was foraging on the garlic chives in the late afternoon. These wasps are considered to be extremely strong despite their fragile looking frames. The females dig burrows where they lay their eggs, and then they find a caterpillar, preferably a big fat tomato worm more than double her size, grabs it with her powerful jaws, stings it to paralyze it, then drags it to the burrow where she laid her eggs, stuffs the caterpillar in the burrow, and covers the opening with dirt and rocks to hide her stash. When the eggs hatch, the larvae feed on the caterpillar until they pupate and dig out of the burrow as full grown wasps. Thread-waisted Wasps are not aggressive toward humans, unless the humans in question happen to look like giant caterpillars or, even better, great big plump tomato worms. Thread-Waisted Wasps will sting in self defense — if stepped on or handled roughly, for example.

In case anyone has been wondering about the owls, Little Owl says hi! We see owls almost ever night, and I often photograph them, usually in very low light. Last night Little Owl and Big Owl were in a tree on our property, flew over to the bosque, and then they both showed up by Beaver Point when I was out calling to the beavers. The sun had set, but Little Owl landed on a branch facing the afterglow from sunset.

Iceberg

Beaver swimming across the river at golden hour.

After the beaver made it to the other side of the river he tread water by a gnawed branch trying his best to blend in.