Don’t Forget the Camera
OR THE PHONE
When I am gardening, especially when I am gardening, I forget to bring the camera. Sure these days it is much easier to capture a moment with your phone, provided you have it with you, it is charged up and easily accessible. Seventy percent of the time, the phone is in the house or elsewhere, not in my back pocket.
It is so easy to capture a flower, plant or scene. All I have to do is run back into the house and grab the phone. Everything stays exactly as I left it. But those unexpected moments: the surprise visitor. The fleeting rainbow. They are much harder to capture even if you are prepared.
Some exceptional surprises can occur in your own backyard. You need to be on the lookout for them and have a phone or camera handy.
Just yesterday, I spied the neighbor’s dog with what looked like a large ball in its mouth. She brought it up to their the back porch and deposited it. That’s when I could see it was a dead possum. Or was it? The dogs were called inside and in 10 minutes the possum resurrected itself and trotted off. Did I have my phone? My camera? Of course not!
Less than an hour later I saw not one, but two, red shouldered hawks in my Persimmon tree. You would think that I would have retrieved my phone after seeing the possum revive, yes? No!
Among some of the critters I have seen in my backyard are groundhogs, hawks, possums, raccoons, blue tailed skinks, birds of all sorts, butterflies, frogs … You get the picture. In most cases however, I did not. All because I did not have my phone!
Here are some of the ones I did:
A blue tailed skink. Did you know only the females and young sport the trendy tail? It is a defensive characteristic. Predators go for the pretty tail, which is detachable, giving the lizard a chance to escape.
This turkey was far away. The phone could not focus in on her well.
These last few of hummingbirds were taken with a Nikon Coolpix 900. I sat very still on my porch for hours trying to get these photos.
A photo of a deer in a NJ snowstorm. Courtesy of my brother, Duane Rodgers.