It’s the time of year to be seeing things like this:
…although I suspect these geese were just flying around, and have no intention of leaving the area for the winter. We have a lot of year-round resident geese.
I found a rock that had fallen off the wall, and was about to put it back on top, when
I decided to put the rock somewhere else and let this guy be. There are actually very few venomous snakes in South Carolina, especially the upstate, but I had no reason to give this little critter any trouble.
It started out with a foggy morning, which didn’t stop anyone from being out & about:
This Great Blue Heron, flying IFR in the fog, looked to have some ragged trailing edges:
One of the neat little places off the lake:
Then I saw this Green Heron on a chunk of tree over the water. He was all over it watching the water underneath, and didn’t seem to pay me much attention as I hung around maybe 10-15 meters away. I was sure she’d be nabbing something out of the water…
…which would have made a neat action shot, but after a half an hour, I gave up on it. Such is wildlife photography.
The morning started with a spectacular show by the rising sun…
…which the lake denizens took in:
The rest of these I’m going to call “art”. That sounds better than “what happens when you try to take action shots of a Great Blue Heron with really poor lighting”.
I got out on the lake early in the morning. It was a pretty nice morning, but a light southerly wind swept up enough moisture from the lake to sock in the areas north of the spillway. In spots, visibility was on the order of 100m.
When I got back, I heard a Great Blue Heron squawking and this other sharp call I’ve heard from time to time, but didn’t really know what it was. Then this little Green Heron landed right on the dock, practically right next to me, and hung around for some pictures.
What’s that expression about how the Heron flies?
No, that’s not right … it’s “How the Osprey flies…”
Crow! That’s it! It’s “How the Crow flies”!
In aerodynamics, drag is directly related to “frontal area”, or how much surface area is presented to the oncoming air. Birds don’t have a lot of frontal area in their flight configuration:
The Osprey are nesting on top of the intake structure. Best of luck to ’em!
I’m pretty sure this is a Bonaparte’s Gull, found hangin’ out near the dam, and probably on her way to breeding grounds, as they’re considered transients in this area:
(as usual, click on a picture to get to a higher-resolution version)
I know, what took me so long? Finally, here’s the first Creature Feature of 2014.
The first thing you notice is all the pollen and tree seeds on the water:
Cormorants and Geese were on patrol in the early morning cool:
And the Herons were in on the action too, commin’ right at ya (almost):
And ducks were fueling up for the day:
And, in a more pedestrian moment, my visiting Sister spotted this little guy on the side of the road, unfortunately expired. Adult human fingers included for scale. Anyone know what sort of snake this might have been? The blue color is distinctive, but might have changed since he died.
I was in a store this morning gathering supplies when I remembered that I need to get some vegetable seeds to plant. It’s been too busy a year to do much, but I still wanted to grow something. So I grabbed some seeds.
Later, as I was getting ready to plant them, I realized, drat, I should have also looked for some marigold seeds. Growing marigolds in with the vegetables noticeably reduces the number of hornworms we have to pick off the tomato plants. Oh well.
But as I started to clear away last year’s marigold plants, I realized that I didn’t need to buy seeds at all.
There were plenty of seeds left on the old plants. Who knew? 🙂
The recent rains evidently created a lot of runoff, which is heading into the lake. You can see the silt moving down into the lake from the South Rabon Creek, and getting stirred around by the aeration system near the dam.
Who’d’ve thunk I’d be doing another winter storm post right after the first one?
This one started with just a quick inch of snow that melted right off of most stuff (including the roads) on Tuesday. Then things got interesting, with snow beginning in earnest Wednesday morning. It slacked off in the afternoon before resuming with mixed precip in the evening and finished off with some snow squalls Thursday morning. Total accumulation here looked like about 4.5 inches.
The meteorology of this storm wasn’t all that unusual for this part of the world, except for it’s intensity. High pressure to the north setting up a “cold air damming” scenario: cold air gets blown up against the east side of the mountains where it just piles up. Then add a Gulf of Mexico low traveling up the coast throwing moisture all on top of that. More often than not, this setup gives the forecasters fits because you have warm air, cold air, and somewhere they’re going to meet, but it’s hard to nail down just where that is. As a result, there’s often a lot of uncertainty as to whether we’re going to get snow, sleet, freezing rain, rain, or frogs. This time there wasn’t a lot of question.
The view Wednesday morning, which didn’t look all that bad:
But things went downhill from there. By Thursday morning, in between show showers:
Total accumulation:
But like a typical Carolina winter storm, Thursday afternoon it warmed up and cleared out, giving me a chance to work on the driveway:
Lest anyone think I’m just lazy, there’s a madness to my method. By tomorrow morning all this is going to freeze again. If those shoveled out tracks don’t dry off and instead turn to ice, I can make my way down on the crunchy snow/slush areas, and maybe not end up in the lake at the bottom of the hill. Hopefully by later in the day the tracks will melt and make for an easy climb back up.
Now for the “creature content”. A couple weeks ago we got a couple more hanging feeders deployed in the back yard. One of them is a clear plastic tube feeder, and as the Goldfinches attacked it, I could almost see the seed going down in the tube. Almost. So I got the idea to do a time-lapse video to showcase the operation. With some extra time around the house Wednesday, I put together this video:
Our first winter storm of 2014 is mostly history. Who says it doesn’t snow in South Carolina?
This storm was interesting in a couple of ways. Because of the temperature profiles, there was really no question about what sort of precipitation we were going to get: it was all snow. Usually there’s a lot of uncertainty about whether we’ll get rain, freezing rain, sleet, and/or snow. Often it ends up being freezing rain, resulting in ice on everything.
The other interesting thing is that this storm drew in moisture off the Atlantic, and the amount of snow was actually higher towards the south. A friend in Greenwood, to the south, reported about 2 inches of snow, while I measured just under one inch.
As usual, the effects of this weather continue. Any snow that melted but didn’t dry up will be ice by morning, “black ice”, so called because you often can’t see it when you’re driving down the road. If you’re not careful, you can end up in the ditch with no clue what happened.
Can’t let this go out without some creature content:
