Spent much too long tonight looking at animals on the computer monitor – but my brain is in slow motion after a grueling couple of days at work, so it seemed like just the right speed.
I got a link from a friend on Facebook, and followed that around to the Daily Coyote, which must be a fascinating blog about a woman’s experiences raising a coyote, since I started at ‘the beginning’ and read it through more than a year’s worth of posts and pictures, straight, at the first sitting. At first, it was a little hard for me to believe that this woman managed to get so much notoriety (not to mention a book deal and a living) off of writing updates about and posting pictures of a coyote, but as I got deeper into it, I realized that there was much more to it than that. First off, the pictures are really wonderful. Second, I think there is something about interacting with non-domesticated animals that is really powerful and more than a little humbling. While I couldn’t really see making the life decisions that would go with living with a coyote, it’s fun to experience it vicariously.
Then, I spent a bunch of time wandering around my friend, David’s blog, TreeInTheDoor. David is amazing, really, and it is always fun to run into him to share stories about the animals that he’s encountered recently. He has the kind of knowledge of Yosemite’s wildlife that you can really only get by wandering around outside a LOT and being very observant. I love the names that he gives to different places and and animals that are, at once, so practical, and yet so uniquely David’s own, as if it might be a completely different place than the one I live in.
Recently, David showed us the location of Owl’s home and Tom and I have paid it a couple of visits to see what was going on. Our efforts were rewarded with sightings of Owl and her two young ones. Our skill as photographers leaves something to be desired (although we can blame some of that on our camera), but in some ways just getting to see them is special enough. Someday, hopefully, we’ll save up and get a really nice pair of birding binoculars, and some L-series lenses…