Sunrise, sunset, silhouettes

I love sunsets, I love sunrises, and I absolutely love silhouettes. But I have to admit I never gave much thought before to how all three of my loves are intertwined. I think the revelation came when I started to get serious about photography. I’ve always had a camera with me, and I’ve always taken pictures, but since I've gotten both a digital camera and a Photo-enhancer computer program, I’m paying more attention to how lighting and composition can make art out of a snapshot. (No, I’m not an artist. I think of my “art” as a kindergartner thinks of finger painting. Hey, look what I did! I like it! Woohoo!)

Anyone who knows me can tell you that I’m a nut for sunrise and sunset pictures. I’ve taken hundreds of them, and I’ll bore people with them every chance I get. I have so many, I often can't even remember where they were taken. (This one I know…it’s off of my deck looking west northwest.) Sometimes I don’t even know if the picture I’m looking at is a sunrise or a sunset. But I can see now that those older pictures are sterile and actually pretty uninteresting. That’s because there is no framing. And that’s where those wonderful silhouettes come in.

In the early days when I took sunrise/sunset pictures, I didn’t want anything to get in the way of the beauty before me. I zeroed in on the spectacle and took snap after snap as the sun either rose or set. I, in effect, genericized the bloody things. Now I look to see how I can frame it, and since it’s usually either still dark or getting dark, everything I see is a silhouette.

In fact, with the right backlighting, silhouettes can appear anywhere. I love the idea that I can make out what something is, even if it’s totally black, simply by its shape. And I have to believe my appreciation comes directly from watching sunrises and sunsets all of my life.

So why didn’t I see this before? I’ve always been crazy for silhouettes, ever since the teacher stood me against a wall, shined a light on me, and drew my profile on black construction paper. (My mom framed it. It’s around here somewhere, so don't be surprised if it suddenly appears here one day. It looks just like me. Uncanny.)

The Suicidal Frog

My grandson, the famous frog hunter, is up for a visit and after a week and a half, the frogs have finally gotten smart and found Jonathan-proof hiding places. To the east about 70 feet is "Frog Kingdom" and to the west about a full city block is "Frog Heaven". Armed with a butterfly net and a minnow bucket, the mighty hunter goes forth, choosing his direction by the wind, the weather, and just good old 7-year-old instinct. Frogs and toads, from old and huge to young and tiny, huddle in the grass at the bottom of the bucket as he trudges back to show everybody his catch. He watches them intently, and the rest of us hope the old ones don't take a notion to eat the tasty, young ones in front of his innocent little eyes.

After an hour or so, he knows he has to let them go, and his idea of real adventure is to let the Eastern "Frog Kingdom" frogs loose in the Western "Frog Heaven" and vice versa. Do they find their way back home? Of course they do. It's the nature of things, according to the book of Jon.

It got me to thinking about the suicidal frog I ran into at the clotheslines one day, and I wondered whether that particular frog eventually came to its senses and is now responsible for some of the progeny ending up in the minnow bucket and beyond.

It was a warm, sunny, early spring day with a breeze off the lake that cried out for sheets to be drying on the line. I had just set my basket down when I sensed something in the grass to my left. It was a big, green frog and I don't know how I knew it was there, because it could have been a frog statue, still as a stone. It sat there with it's head turned away from me the entire time I was hanging the sheets, and that seemed mighty odd, considering I could be the enemy for all it knew.

But then I saw what it was watching, and I just have to assume that I was more horrified than that frog was. It was a snake in the grass. A REAL snake in the grass. And it was poised, head up, looking ready to strike. But the frog just sat there, waiting. "Go!" I whispered to that frog, but if it heard me, it didn't acknowledge it. "Get out of here!" I said out loud, but it never twitched a muscle. I stomped my foot, and again--nothing.

Finally I turned my attention to the snake. I was not going to be a witness to this. No frog on my watch was going to commit suicide-by-snake. I had a long clothesline-prop nearby, and I reached for it, but then thought better of it. What if that snake crawled up the prop and got me before I could send it flying?

What to do, what to do? "Get out of here!" I yelled to the snake. But once again I might as well have been a thousand miles away. Neither of them were paying any attention to me. I was afraid to move, because I had it in my head that my presence was the only thing keeping that frog alive. If I moved in any direction--toward the frog, away from the frog--the snake would strike for sure. There were no rocks within reach, nothing to throw, so I yelled louder : "Come on you guys, stop this!"

Finally, my husband came around the corner to see what all the fuss was about, and he calmly kicked the snake away from the grass and onto the beach, where it slithered into the water and went out of sight.

So what did the frog do? It looked at me as if to say, Fool!", and hopped down to the beach in hot pursuit of it's executioner.

The moral of this story is, when a frog wants to die, it’s going to die no matter what kind of intervention you desperately attempt. Saving the world is a sorry, unappreciated business. Take your victories where you find them, and forget about the ingrates, amphibians included.

Will this hummingbird live another day?

For a couple of days now, we've had hummingbirds at our feeders. Or maybe we've just had one hummer that comes around a lot. I don't know, they all look alike to me. But this is what's been happening: The hummer I've been watching for a couple of days now doesn't even go near the feeders reserved for hummingbirds. That is, the ones with bright red nectar in them. This one, instead, goes to the lighthouse-shaped feeder filled with sunflower seeds. The lighthouse is red and white-striped and doesn't look the least bit like a flower, so what draws it, I can't even imagine.

I worry for it, though. What kind of survival instinct is this tiny, little bird lacking? I've heard that hummers have to spend most of their waking hours looking for food in order to sustain an ultra-high metabolism. Their little wings whir like helicopter blades constantly, and it's a rare thing to see them still. You can count their inactivity in seconds.

There are days when I wish I could be a hummingbird just for an hour. Think of the things I could accomplish! But how do they use all that energy? They use it looking for food! (What a waste. . .but I know the feeling.)

I was thinking about drenching that lighthouse feeder with sugar water, but really, what would I be teaching that little dummy?

I thought about just taking the lighthouse feeder down, but how would the finches and chickadees feel about that?

No, I just have to ignore that silly hummer. If it can't find food that's only a few feet away while it's hammering away at that red wooden stripe, there's not much I can do to save it from itself. It's a tough world out there. The little guys have to learn that fast, or else.

I'm going out now to change the nectar in the feeder. Maybe some new stuff will finally draw it. It's all I can do.

Canada Geese babies

Don't let anybody kid you--website building is not all that easy. I'm still tweaking, but had to let it go over Memorial Day weekend. Something happened on my host site and I wasn't able to edit anything. It was just as well, because we had company all weekend and I was happy to spend all my time with them. It was a gorgeous weekend. A real miracle, considering it was cold before they all got here on Thursday night and turned cold and ugly again after they left on Monday morning. They brought the good weather with them, and then took it back. Not fair!

The Canada geese babies were on our shore the other day. Fuzzy and yellow and scampering everywhere. They grow so fast, within a week they'll look like teenagers.

The parents looked frazzled, and why not? They spend all their time looking out for enemies and trying to herd those little chicks back to their sides.

We'll let them stay for a while, but once those chicks have grown a little, we'll be shooing them away. They think "beach" means "latrine" and we can't have that.