Fragments From Floyd

The dog barked his bark that means "What the heck?" and so I dropped what I was doing and went out to see what the heck. Tsuga was behind the house, facing up into the pine trees, asking WHO GOES THERE? and I supposed it was a deer in the cover of the spring foliage. No sooner had I rounded the corner of the house when a black shape appeared. Small at first: a dog. Then, growing suddenly larger: a bear. Then to my amazement the thing launched itself from the hillside in a flurry of wings and disappeared the other side of the house, at about rooftop level. It was an enormous turkey gobbler, and had not gone far. I could hear it calling from whereever it had landed. I ran inside to grab my camera (and took the dog with me, and left him there, of course. A boon to wildlife he is not, after the initial LOOK WHAT I FOUND bark.)

With my long lens ready, I eased up to the north corner of the house and peered around it discretely with one eye, scanning the edge of the pasture. I could still hear the gobbler cluck cluck clucking, but for the life of me I couldn't tell where it was coming from. I waited. Then I took a cautious step from my hiding place. Just then, almost directly over head, came the flutter and squawk of the turkey who had all along been perched almost directly over my head in the maple tree at the corner of our front porch. And off he went through the trees, safe from my autofocus, and the image was missed.

But as I stood there photographically unfulfilled, a pair of ravens circled unusually close overhead, and I grabbed a shot. But hey: I am not Doug Thompson who stops his car on the side of the road, sees a bird, pulls off the shot with is 4000mm infrared heat seeking lens and comes back with a full-frame 16 megapixel eagle against the setting sun. So I got a nice, boring shot of a raven against a featureless blue sky and had to photoshop the black bird onto a cloud picture from my archives to appear Thompsonian. But as they say, imitation is the sincerest form of laziness and mediocrity.

Til I capture the real thing, I'll have to cobble and hack my inspirational visions from fragments. But the combo of raven and cloud does bring to mind some lofty thoughts for the day: