Steven Helmer Publications

I had planned on posting these yesterday evening. But, I wound up being at the ice rink 3 hours longer than expected and, by the time I got home, I was ready to eat dinner and go to bed. I took advantage of a sunny and warm (but not too warm) day to get my walk in and these are some of the photos I was able to get yesterday.

It was a bit overcast today, making it a little difficult to get some photos because of the lack of light. But, the part was almost deserted so I was able to go for my walk without a lot of people scaring photos away. My big surprise of the day had to be a painted turtle I encountered on one of the trails. Not only was it an unusual spot for it, the turtle made no effort to get away from me as I walked past it. I'm wondering if maybe it was making a nest or something. Here are some of the photos I took:

In addition to the little turtle I spotted while walking on one of the trails, I was relatively successful finding other critters to photograph as well. Here are some of the photos I was able to take:

I had some errands to take care of yesterday and didn't get an opportunity to go for a walk as a result. However, I was able to get out today and enjoy what is going to be one of the few remaining warm days. In fact, I even took an extra 15 minutes. There wasn't too much overly unique on this walk today. Eventually, I'll start seeing more migrating birds. But, for the most part, it's just bugs, frogs and turtles at the moment. But, I enjoyed my walk and that's all that really counts in my opinion. Here are some of the photos I was able to take: I was kicking myself after this photo because, I was so focused on the caterpillar, I missed the fairly large garter snake sunning itself a few feet away from me. And, of course, as soon as I noticed it and turned to get the photo, it was gone. To add insult to injury, the caterpillar photo ended up being a little out of focus. I'm patting myself on the back a bit with this one. I norm...

My lunchtime walk was somewhat uneventful today. I saw an interesting bird. But, it flew by too fast for me to get a good enough look at it (or a photo of it) so I could identify what it was and, other than the usual frogs and toads, I didn't see much else. I did have this dragonfly buzz by me, however, and, mostly because I thought it looked interesting, grabbed a photo of it when it stopped to take a break.

I managed to get a walk in at lunch today, despite needing to avoid a bunch of flooded trails. There were a lot of dragonflies out and about and I managed to get photos of some of them:

I went for my walk at lunch today and was disappointed I didn't see more than I ended up seeing. Not counting the garter snake that startled me because I nearly stepped on it (I didn't manage to get a photo of that), I mostly only saw a couple birds and plenty of bugs. I did, however, get a photo of this dragonfly as it was resting on a piece of grass near one of the ponds.

A long time ago, back before global warming was the media darling it is now, I had a college professor predict another ice age that would start within my lifetime. This morning, as I went for my walk in temperatures that I would expect in early April (not when it is almost July), I started to think maybe he was right. But, I trudged through (fortunately, I had a change of socks with me this time) and managed to get a few photos. I saw this mallard swimming around in one of the ponds this morning. It was eyeing me the whole time so I suspect he was guarding a nest somewhere. I would have loved to have gotten a better photo of this heron. But, it spotted me right away and flew off the second I tried to get closer to it. I saw this little marsh bird poking its head out at me from the grass and grabbed a photo of it when it came out into the open for a couple minutes. This dragonfly landed next to me while I was checking out one of the ponds. Since it wa...