It is ironic that most of the time here I am complaining about how fast the year is progressing, but now that I wouldn’t mind the minutes rolling by more rapidly…it seems like everything has slowed to a crawl. Such is fate I guess. Actually this is a good week at Intrigued. Brad and Jan have wrapped up everything related to the annual St. Jude charity run and on their recovery phase, Home Depot FINALLY released this year’s Halloween offerings yesterday (at 5am) and tomorrow my stitches come out. Fingers crossed that leads to better night’s sleep! It also officially marks the halfway point for the 6 week no-weight segment. Looking back I have to applaud myself for being the “good” patient (got a lot of people ready to drop the hammer on me if I don’t) and looking forward, well, “holy hell, get me out of here”. Thankfully there are plenty of pictures to process, Halloween props to wire, haunt tutorials to make and posts to keep my eyes off the clock. Speaking of all things haunt, a curious reader brought to our attention that we missed the post quota last month (we have some demanding readers ha) – turns out they missed my 2024 tombstone review on the Mothership (Boy’s Got Some Stones link here). Feel free to take a look if you are curious how those turned out. While I mentally prepare for thread being pulled out of my ankle, please enjoy another adventure from Brad and Jan.
Take it away Brad…
Jan and I first saw this bird at the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Preserve (RFNWP) a couple of years ago. However, one of my rules for publishing photos is that the image must be usable if I have to resort to severe cropping. I am always saying, “I don’t want a 6-pixel image of a backlit dark object.” Well, with our new cameras, that may have increased to a minimum 60-pixel image. But still, who wants to look at dark fuzzy thing on the screen and try to guess what it is. With my years of experience photographing wildlife (all couple of years of it), I don’t even try for those photos any longer. Not taking them saves time sorting and editing later as well as saving clicks on my camera shutters. That 250k mark on the shutter assembly rolls around quickly enough as is.
On our semi-annual Wildlife Intrigued Rocky Mountain editorial staff visit with our daughter Allyson, Jan and I went to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge (RMANWP). One of the perks of visiting is that we get to use her Honda CR-V to drive all over the place while she is working her primary job. RMANWP is a very large park at nearly 16,000 acres. The park is large enough to have an 11-mile, mainly square-shaped, Wildlife Drive embedded within it, plus a couple of miles of road on either end. Visitors enter the one-way Drive by crossing a set of bison guards embedded in the road and then driving anti-clockwise around the Drive. For those not familiar with a bison guard, or cattle guard, it is a series of horizontally mounted rails or pipes embedded over an empty space in the roads. The theory, and reality, being that hooved animals will not want to cross the guard; therefore, no actual gates are needed over the roadway. This means easy access for vehicles while keeping livestock inside, or outside depending on which way you are travelling. Fencing is obviously required up to the edge of the gates in the roads and beyond.
At the end of the 11-mile wildlife drive, just before the final set of bison guards in the road, a dark object flew through the sky and landed in a tree less than 50 feet from us. Since it was far larger than 60 pixels, Jan and I wanted to begin taking photos.
Now what do we have here, hit the jump to learn more about this spiffy looking Hawk.
Continue reading Is that Bird Wearing a T-Shirt?…by Brad Marks
Wildlife Intrigued 