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| Bounding Through the Morning Dew |
Until today I'd only caught glimpses of our resident long-tailed weasels. The best sighting I had was a single critter bounding toward me and my wife on a trail in Tennessee Valley, and it shot past our feet before I could even think about trying to take a picture.
When I recently got a tip about where to photograph weasels (thanks, Greg!), I wondered if I'd actually get lucky enough to see one when I got there. In fact, the first "weasel" I set up on turned out to be a gopher! Soon enough, though, I was staring through my lens at the real thing -- and not just one real thing, but several of them.
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| Greeting the Morning |
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| At first these sweet-looking fur-bearers stayed very close to their burrows, just briefly popping up to periscope the terrain. |
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| Formerly in the genus Mustela, long-tailed weasels are now known as Neogale frenata. I wondered if the "frenata" was derived from the Latin for "frenzied" but it actually means "bridle," in reference to its facial markings. The generic epithet is from Greek, not Latin, for "new weasel," in reference to these being New World weasels. In Greek mythology, Gale "was a very skillful witch who earned the wrath of Hecate, the Greek goddess of magic." |
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| This black phoebe snagged a fat treat that the bird maneuvered with its beak until the whole caterpillar went down the hatch. |
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| The old lichen-crusted goalposts also provided pit stops for other birds, like this violet-green swallow. |
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| Hands-Down Cute |
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| This is the only full-frame shot in today's post (the rest are cropped). With my 300mm lens and 1.7X teleconverter I had 500mm of reach. Unfortunately, I found right away that my old-tech autofocus wasn't going to cut it, so I had to shoot everything using manual focus. |
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| I love their little dirt-crusted paws (click pictures to view larger). |
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| Flying antics above a burrow hole. |
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| A few of the weasels were interested in climbing around on the goal posts, but they didn't climb very high up. I wouldn't be surprised if they could get to the top, but they might instinctually feel it would be pushing their luck to get so far from their burrows. |
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| This is a very serious-looking weasel. |
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| Goldfinch on the Goal Post |
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| Stretching their legs as well as their bodies. |
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| Sometimes there were as many as three or four weasels playing in close proximity around the burrows. |
I promised not to name this place on the blog, but I was not the only photographer there. One of the photographers was asking people not to get closer than 25 feet from the weasels. He got some guff when he asked a woman to move back, and it escalated to the point where she dropped an F-bomb on him, and he phoned for a ranger to come by.
And such a beautiful morning!* * *
