Gifts: Today it was things with wings

It was William James who spoke of the ‘slow dead heave of the will’ and boy, did that expression come home to me this morning.  I was getting ready to go see my mother and I thought I would stop off at Fort Harrison State Park on the way home and shoot what there was to shoot (with a camera).  I had a good visit with Mom and then it started: do I really want to go shoot or not?  What was I going to shoot?  What would be interesting?  Anything?  Maybe I won’t go.  I’ll go tomorrow.  You get the idea.  And the moral of the story is that the head should not be in charge of some decisions.  Sometimes it is best just to go do it.  Which I did.

I went over near the walnut plantation and was roaming around among the weeds and I came upon a good sized thistle with lots of blooms and on many of the blooms there was a butterfly.


Hoo boy!  This is the good stuff!  Fortunately the camera was in burst mode where all I had to do was point it and hold the button down and it would take up to six and a half frames a second.  Butterflies were coming and going and everything was changing from one moment to the next.


Bumblebees were getting into the act as well.

And that was when the Canada geese showed up.


Yes, the moon was right there.  I will admit I didn’t even notice it until much later.  Some days we’re just lucky, which is nice because it balances out some of those other days.

To shoot or not to shoot is no longer the question.  My hero is Elwood P. Dowd, the Jimmy Stewart character in the movie ‘Harvey.’   If someone said the two of them ought to go for a drink sometime, Elwood would reply ‘When?’

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No herons for you today, would you take some nice Canada geese?

Becky and I went over to Fort Harrison State Park this morning.   I wanted to see how the trees were starting to come out across Lake Delaware.  I had taken a similar shot a couple of days ago and this time of year, things change pretty quickly.  That earlier shot was included in my last post.

The trees are starting to turn green and I was glad to be there to record it.  As I was setting up for this shot I was showing Becky where the heron was that I wrote about last time.  It had come in from the left and swept across right in front of me.  But because of the camera settings I had forgotten about, I blew the shot.  As I was talking she was nodding rather vigorously and when I was through she said a heron had just flown behind me.  This was April 2, not April 1.  She was telling the truth.    OK, I can be philosophical about these things but then Mother Nature rubbed it in.  She gave me Canada geese.

There was a nesting pair across Fall Creek and why not get a shot of them?

The nesting pair attracted others and we counted nine geese.  There were probably more.  They were everywhere.

The occasional Canada goose is nice but I’m holding out for the heron.  Next time I’ll be ready.  Unless she (or he) is readier.