Picture Post!

Instead of editing yesterday's absolutely enormous entry to include pictures at the moment, I'll post some of the goings on in our life in a separate post. This also frees me up to post pictures that aren't from Saturday.

Here's Libby at the Mudpots, Wister Unit Imperial Wildlife Area. You can see that this part of the area is barren. I guess that's because of the mud pots. There's quite a few more than the one she's above (you can see the hole in the lower left). Isn't Libby cute?


This is me at the same mud pots, but I'm at the other side of the little deck here. I'm pointing excitedly at a pot of mud. "Look at this awesome smelly devil's cauldron!" I exclaim ecstatically.

Note we are well equipped with our binoculars for any awesome bird that might happen to pop out of these mud pots. Behind me you can see the thick vegatation bordering the ponds of Wister. That's where you can take the heavily vegetated trails.


This ancient mud-flow to which Libby is directing our attention is found at the intersection of Davis and Schrimpf roads, near Niland, CA. This is a different place than the previous pictures. Here the mud formed volcanoes that are like 6 feet high. This is a baby one, but it's got big plans, we can tell. We're very proud of its efforts.


This is the actual active crater of one of our mud volcanoes. I took this standing on the volcano, so imagine a pile of dried mud about 4 feet high. This was one of the biggest. I wish I had actually taken a picture of one of the volcanoes, instead I focused on the bubbling mud. I got some cool videos, but the bubbling mud just doesn't come out as bubbling in still photography.

Maybe Lem can explain that for us.

Note the viscous character of the mud. Looks like melted chocolate ice cream to me.


Ok, now here are some pictures from our trip to Big Bear the last week of December. Remember when we saw the Bald Eagles?


This is Libby looking at the Eagles (George and Gracie were their names, since they hung out on the Burns property: no we did not name them).

Our spotting scope is a Brunton. It zooms from 18-36, and is pretty much awesome for its price. It's filled with an inert gas, and has a color correcting lense. It's nothing, of course, compared to the 3,000 dollar models, but then we weren't willing to pay 3,000 dollars.

Not that we really have 3,000 dollars to pay, of course. Even birders can be gear heads when it comes to optics.


Here's what Libby's looking at.

This is Gracie. Above her head is George's foot and some of his other feathers.

Also, this is what happens when you take a picture with a digital camera through your spotting scope. It's not perfect, of course, and this is my first try. There's actually quite an art to it, and they call it "digiscoping." Since birders already have these little telescopes, there's no sense in spending a lot of money to buy a giant telephoto for your camera. You can just buy a cheap digital camera, and do the same thing with your old gear. There's a bit of an art to it, and I look forward to attempting more digiscopes in the future. We actually didn't know that this turned out until we put it on the computer. Libby and I both were excited to see the bird.