After doing part one of this post I started looking into lichen identification a little bit. (Not even intentionally, really; I just got sidetracked while looking up something else.) I’ve started to have a general idea of some of the lichens I’ve seen around, but I haven’t gotten too far yet. One of the lichens I was able to most clearly figure out was one I had been saving for the second part, because it was distinctive and I took quite a few pictures of it.
I took a bunch of pictures of a variety of different lichens while we were in New Mexico. When I went through them to make a post about lichens I found it difficult to narrow them down to a reasonable number of photos for a post, which was why I decided to split it up. I’ve noticed I take a lot of lichen photos when I travel, which is partly because the lichens where I live are mostly very tiny and tricky to photograph well, but also New Mexico seemed like a good place for lichens.
Here is a series of photos I took shortly before I went to New Mexico of a bluebird doing acrobatics to reach some dogwood berries. This series is definitely an improvement over the last time I tried to photograph a bird eating dogwood berries (which was shortly after I got the telephoto lens and was still getting a feel for it). Though all these photos are cropped at least a little, I think it’s cool to be able to see some of the poses of a bird foraging for berries since they usually move a bit too fast to be able to see what they’re doing.
Last November I went on a trip to New Mexico to visit some family and it was as beautiful there as I was assured it would be. While I was there I did quite a bit of hiking around in different areas. There were two general areas, that were each their own separate ecosystems, that I visited. One of these was the mountains, and the other was the canyon, which was in a lower (though low is relative) desert area. Both were the sort of landscapes that would make going there (as a photographer) and not doing some landscape photography seem… kind of wrong. I hadn’t really done a ton of landscape photography before, but I’m pretty happy with some of the landscape type photos I took on the trip.
Mountains
The mountains were mostly covered with evergreen forest, interspersed with rocky outcrops and cliffs as well as rivers flowing down to the land below. Because of the season we went, there were some interesting ice formations around the rivers.
Canyon
The canyon we visited was the Rio Grande Gorge. I found a trail that went from the rim of the canyon down to the river, which we did on our last day there. The canyon area had lots of little shrubby looking trees (I think they were mostly just slow growing and sometimes stunted from the conditions they were growing in). I know some of the trees there were junipers, ponderosa pines, and pinion pines. It wasn’t really forested, though, and there were quite a few smaller bushy and herbaceous plants that I wasn’t familiar with (although I’m pretty certain a significant amount of it was sagebrush).
Of course, I took more than just landscape photos on the trip; I actually noticed I was switching lenses and settings quite a bit more regularly than I usually do since I was trying to photograph such a wide variety of subjects. In coming posts I’ll share more of the other kinds of pictures I was taking.
This fox squirrel I photographed this spring fell asleep while I was taking pictures…
This little sandpiper landed not too far from me while I was out with my camera one day. I didn’t immediately recognize this as a species I’d seen before because it looks quite a bit different from the last one I photographed:
When I went to identify my more recent sighting, I realized the markings suggested a young spotted sandpiper, and then I noticed the patch of downy fluff on the back of the neck of the bird in my photos… So the bird must have just molted into proper feathers and not quite shed all the fluffy chick down yet.
The young sandpiper was also making some fairly exaggerated bobbing motions while probing around for food, which also turned out to be characteristic of the spotted sandpiper. 
Sandpipers are shorebirds, so they forage around the edges of bodies of water. It’s good to be able to provide a bit of habitat for them, and nice of this youngster to provide me with a good clear view.
I am quite fond of harvestmen (aka daddy long legs). I’m not exactly sure why I like them so much; the best way I’ve managed to describe it is that they just seem like peaceful little forest spirits… although they’re not found only in the woods, but they do seem particularly plentiful there. So, I suppose, much like the woods, they are a calming presence. Getting good photos of them, though, is a bit tricky. It isn’t that they are uncooperative (they’re actually probably more cooperative than most creatures), but super close up pictures of them tend to look pretty awkward with their legs mostly not in the frame, and they like to hang out in fairly dim places, making it hard for their colors and markings to be visible. I am now finally building up a small collection of harvestman photos that I like.
Despite being pretty common, easy to find creatures, not many people seem to know what harvestmen are; they are often called spiders, but, though they are arachnids, they belong to their own group. (They’re actually thought to be more closely related to scorpions.) The name ‘harvestmen’ refers to the order opiliones, which is a pretty general category. (For example, butterflies and moths are an order, and beetles are another order. And so are spiders.) So, not surprisingly, there are lots of different kinds of harvestmen. They come in many different sizes, shapes, and colors and have a variety of diets and habits. The harvestmen in these photos are only a tiny fraction of their variety.
Although harvestmen look similar to spiders, they don’t have two distinctly separate body segments as spiders do. They also don’t produce silk or venom. Instead of venom carrying fangs, they have a pair of tiny pincer like claws. (I’ve actually seen them carrying things with these claws, though I haven’t gotten a good look at the claws themselves as they’re tucked under the harvestman’s body.) They also use their second pair of legs (from front) as feelers and I’d noticed them probing around with them (and also that that pair of legs is often extra long) before I was able to find information about it.
I’m always happy to see these little guys even if I don’t end up taking pictures of them, but I do hope I’m able to get better at photographing them.
I like being able to figure out interesting ways to photograph familiar subjects that shows them in a much different way than people are used to seeing them (usually in a way that draws attention to something I’ve noticed about them). These photos are a good example of that concept: 
If you weren’t able to figure it out, these are veins on the ‘wings’ of maple seeds (which are technically called samaras). The samara in the second to last photo is the oldest; the green between the veins is actually the background because that one was pretty translucent. These were all cropped at least slightly which gives them a nice abstract look, but I also liked some of them uncropped too.
I was out with my camera one day and I spotted this little jumping spider with an impressively large catch (a green bottle fly, I think). Jumping spiders are active little hunters; they do not build webs and wait for prey to get trapped, they search out and pounce on their prey. In this case, by the time I spotted them both the fly and the spider were suspended in midair by a strand of the spider’s silk (which they use as a safety line when they leap off of things) and spinning wildly. I’m not sure if the spider managed to pounce on the fly in midair or if the fly took off right after being pounced on.
I went up north recently to visit my Grandma and while I was walking around her yard I kept noticing lichens everywhere. They were small and probably not very noticeable to most, but they really stuck out to me because they were still much larger then the vast majority of the lichens that grow where I live. (And of the few that are larger, I haven’t seen any that are as brightly colored or intricately textured like the ones I was finding at my Grandma’s. This isn’t to say there aren’t any interesting lichens where I live, but they’re just generally much smaller and harder to find.) Lichens are pretty amazing, but I don’t know a whole lot about them, really. Most of what I do know is from reading the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (which I highly recommend), which was enough to pique my interest. So, for this post I don’t have much to say about the individual photos, I just think they look cool.
“They blur the definition of what it means to be an individual, as a lichen is not one being, but two: a fungus and an alga. These partners are as different as could be and yet are joined in a symbiosis so close that their union becomes a wholly new organism.” (From the chapter about lichens in Braiding Sweetgrass.)
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