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I took Hobbes outside this morning to do his business (he’s still hobbled up, so we can’t just let him out to do his thing in the backyard, we have to actually leash him up and walk him over to where he can pee), and it was about 6:30am, which this time of year is about an hour before sunrise. I glanced about for cars on the street (there were none), and when I looked up at the southern sky, to the left, my jaw dropped. Orion the Hunter was there, in all his glory, with Canis Major to hisDown the rabbit hole….

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Enlargeable version here. I took this photo last Sunday while walking around the Charles Burchfield Art and Nature Center in West Seneca, one of this region’s underknown gems. It was a stunning morning, because the fog had not yet lifted and therefore the light was soft and diffuse and almost dreamy in places. And I am starting to wonder if maybe I’m starting, just starting, to get the hang of this photography thing. More photos from that day here. The spider, dropping down from twig, Unfolds a plan of her devising, A thin premeditated rig To use in rising. AndDown the rabbit hole….

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The Wife and I honeymooned around New England: a couple of days on Cape Cod, a couple of days in Boston, and then we road-tripped through New Hampshire and Vermont on our way home. One thing I wish we’d had time for was a drive up to the top of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. Thanks to my favorite YouTuber, Post 10, I can at least see what the entirety of that drive is like. I wonder how many motorists every year don’t take sufficient care to cool their brakes on the way back down…. (Put that on fullscreen andDown the rabbit hole….

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You may remember me writing a few weeks ago about the Monarch butterfly caterpillar we found in the milkweed outside our front door, and its turning up again a few days later as a chrysalis clinging to the siding of our house. Well, our friend kept hanging there for the better part of three weeks. The chrysalis gradually shifted from bright green and opaque to darker and somewhat translucent, until this past Saturday it looked like this: If you examine the larger version of that photo, you can see the telltale markings of our butterfly friend’s wings inside the chrysalis.Down the rabbit hole….

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Yesterday’s photography location was Hunter’s Creek Park. Officially named “Sergeant Mark A. Rademacher Memorial Park”, the location is more generally referred to by its original, and now informal, name, which comes from the creek that runs through it. Hunter’s Creek Park is one of the most rugged parks in the Erie County Park System, with its most dominant feature being the gorge through which Hunter’s Creek runs. This being the case, the park is a “conservation” park, which means that aside from the two small gravel parking lots at either end (the park roughly runs north-south), there are no facilitiesDown the rabbit hole….

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When we moved to WNY way back in 1981, my grandmother visited and noticed that our new backyard had a lot of milkweed in it. She told me that milkweed is a preferred plant for Monarch butterfly caterpillars, and we should go out and see if we could find any. And we did! Quite a few, even. She helped me modify a jar (by punching holes in the lid), and after picking a few milkweed leaves and stalks, we had ourselves a habitat for a caterpillar. In this way she showed me how to nurture a caterpillar all the wayDown the rabbit hole….

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For the first time since Cane died last September, I went hiking at Chestnut Ridge Park yesterday. Chestnut Ridge is an old park whose development by Erie County began back in the late 1920s, and a lot of the park’s original infrastructure, quite a bit of which still stands, was built by work crews of the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Chestnut Ridge is a very large park–at more than 1100 acres, it is 300 acres larger than New York City’s Central Park–and it covers a lot of rugged terrain, ranging from forested hills to steep gorges throughDown the rabbit hole….