Bear Alert and other things…

1)  We got a phone call early this morning from a neighbor.  I didn’t get to it fast enough and his message went to voice mail.  Of course, my first thoughts are always of some impending disaster or another when we get early (or late) phone calls.  But fortunately, Vic just wanted to tell us that he spied two bear cubs making their way toward our house.  I’m glad he called.  But by the time I got my glasses on and my thoughts together and went downstairs to find my camera, they had skedaddled.  Actually, I think that they came into our yard and made a turn at the stone wall and went to the beach.   They have been spotted swimming out to Blueberry Island on occasion.  So once again I lost my opportunity to snap at them.  When Olive and I went out to get the paper a little later though, I was on alert and had the Nikon with me.  No bears, which I guess is a good thing really.  A pug wouldn’t be much protection for me and I'm not sure what I could do for the pug if we had a close encounter.

2)  I did manage to get a pretty decent shot of a male Cardinal who was hanging around the yard.  We have a nice Cardinal couple who have been hanging out in our crabapple tree.  They are hard to catch though because the minute I go out with my camera, they find they need to go to some other yard or way, way up in a tree.  I got this one through the window.  So there, Mr. Red!  You just try and hide.

3)  Olive, the pug, had her 8 year wellness visit at the vet today and I am happy to say she got a clean bill of health.  She even lost a couple of ounces.  While we were sitting in the waiting room, a woman came in with a Cornish Rex cat.  What a gorgeous creature that is!  And the polar opposite of a pug.  And when we were finished, there was a nice looking tabby waiting to go in.  Cat day at the vets, I guess, except for Olive.  Made me miss my old feline friends.  Olive will spend the rest of the day sleeping and trying to forget the injustice of a trip to the vets.  I’m just glad she’s doing well.

4)  For the last couple of years, Greg and I have made our way down to Griswold, Connecticut to Buttonwood Farm to view the sunflowers.  This year we missed it by a day.  Boo!  When I realized that, I had to bring some sunflowers home from the grocery.  It’s not the same as seeing them en masse in the fields, but it will have to do for this year.

5)  August already!  Are you kidding me???

A sign of the dog days to come??

I'm hooking up today with Tanya's Willy-Nilly Friday 5 

on Around Roanoke, VA...A Daily Photo Blog

At the Columbus Zoo, Part 1…

I know that there are people out there who have moral objections to zoos.  I think that they feel it is wrong to capture animals and put them behind bars to be on display for people’s amusement.  In an ideal world where habitat shrinkage is simply a fantasy, where poaching is imaginary and where animals threatened with extinction are part of a make-believe world, I would be with them.  But this is far from an ideal world and this world is not going to change in the foreseeable future.

  I am not so naïve as to believe that all zoos are benign and that all animals in zoos are treated well.  But there are zoos that do treat animals well and do important work in education and conservation.  The zoo in Columbus, Ohio is one of them.

We have been passing Columbus for many years on our way to and from visits to my family in Southern Ohio.  On this trip back to Massachusetts, my daughter Carrie and I decided to stop.

Our first stop in the zoo was in the North America region.  There are three Polar Bears living there.  This is one of the two zoo-born sisters, Aurora or Anana, who lives there.  Her diving technique reminds me of watching Carrie learn to dive back when she was a little kid.

She was diving in to grab what we were told was frozen fruit juice.  It looks to me like she was pretty happy with her catch.

This little girl was fascinated watching the Polar Bear swimming with the fish.  Who knows?  Maybe this experience will spark a love that will encourage her to become a conservationist or an environmentalist in the future.

This is either Brutus or Buckeye, one of two Alaskan Brown Bears orphaned outside of Anchorage, Alaska.  I was impressed with the size of these bears.  They can get to be 700 pounds of pure bear.  It makes me wonder if I wasn’t born the wrong species.

But if you want to talk about size, check this guy out.  Well, actually, I believe this is a girl because she has no antlers, but a Bull Moose can weigh up to 1,200 pounds.  It is not outside the realm of possibility for us to run across a moose here in Massachusetts.  As a matter of fact, they have been spotted in our neighborhood a couple of times over the years we have lived here.  But I have never had the luck to see one in the wild.  This particular moose is one of three orphans rescued in Alaska and sent to the Columbus Zoo in 2011.

Next stop, a trip to the Shores and beyond…