Figure 1 – Canadian Goose (Branta canadensis), Black’s Nook, Fresh Pond Reserve, Cambridge, MA, April 2015, (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Well, we can all relax now, the espresso machine has made it to the International Space Station.  No really! Nobody is more sympathetic than I to the need for strong coffee in the morning.  I don’t know what it cost to design and make this machine, but I do know that if it was say about a pound it probably cost about $1,000 to get it there. Anyway, such are the necessities of manned and womanned space travel.

As for me I have been enjoying the onset of spring, finally, and have been furiously, perhaps obsessively,  photographing the birds at Fresh Pond.  I am still trying to figure out the vagaries of taking photographs at 640 mm.  This is really not a game for sissies! So the other day around noon, I am taking photographs of the courting Canadian geese on Black’s Nook, when one of the geese makes a v-line towards me.  I took this photograph at a meter or two at full 400 mm (which is 640 mm effective) on my zoom.  I finally figured out why he came so close.  Black’s Nook is a favorite nature spot for school children as well as pre-schoolers, and some of them when the park rangers aren’t around feed them bread. Or, more likely, the rangers look the other way. So this guy saw me as a meal provider not as a threat.

But I was pleased by how the photograph came out; so I share it here as Figure 1.  I like this kind of quirky angle and I particularly like the velvety blackness of the goose’s beak as well as the color of the sky reflected off the water.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM Lens hand-held at 400 mm IS on, ISO 1600, Aperture-Priority AE mode at 1/1000th sec at f/10.0 with no exposure compensation and manual focus.

Figure 1 – Dark eyed junco (Junco hyemalis), Sudbury, MA, April 2015. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

All winter long I have been trying to get a decent photograph of a dark eyed junco (Junco hyemalis).  The problem with him is within his name.  His eye is so dark as to be often invisible, especially when he is photographed against the snow, where the contrast can be overwhelming.  Still this little sparrow is a very appealing little bird.  The males have this dramatic slate color to them, that is truly anything but drab.

On Sunday I continued experimenting with by big lens.  I have discovered it works a lot better when manually focused.  This actually proved not be as difficult as I thought.  I had positioned myself in a lawn chair in front of my feeder.  I had read that birds are not as wary of you when you are seated as opposed to standing.  Well so much for that theory.  Still this littel guy was gregarious enough to pose for a photograph.  The lack of snow enabled me to eliminate the need for overexposure, and remarkably the image of Figure 1 was taken hand-held. I used every post=processing trick that I know of to get the image to come out right, that is with a clearly visible eye.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM Lens hand-held at 400 mm IS on, ISO 1600, Aperture-Priority AE mode at 1/500th sec at f/10.0 with no exposure compensation and manual focus.

Figure 1 – Mockingbird, Mimus polyglottos. Fresh Pond Reserve, April, (c) DE Wolf 2015.

The mockingbird of Figure 1 was a very obliging fellow. Usually the birds keep their social distance, but this one came surprisingly close, although he did prefer the cover of the bush. He did fool me for a very long time.  One of the photographs that I took of him showed a red cap on his head, and I kept searching the bird guides for a red-capped bird that resembles a mockingbird.  Finally, I realized that the red was due to an out of focus tree bud.  I guess that in fooling me he lived up to his name – in sight if not song.

When I was in grade school we did a school play about Abraham Lincoln and this made a big deal over the fact that “listen to the Mockingbird,” a ballad at the time of the American Civil War was a favorite of Lincoln’s. So I kept that with me and was delighted when I moved to Maryland years ago by all the mockingbirds there.  They do often fool you with their mimicry – the mime of many languages.

That play was my great stage debut.  I had one line “No comment,” which I said with great emphasis.  The part at least was speaking.  A friend Scott S. got to play a statue of Lincoln, and passed out with a great crash to the floor. Grade school was so much fun in those days.

Anyway, just a short time after photographing frazil and pancake ice on Fresh Pond, I am delighted to be photographing equally delighted spring birds.  They are all a flutter, well obviously.  It is spring and the great press to mate and have chicks is upon them. Yesterday, I posted on my Facebook page a photograph of the last of winter’s ice on my back patio.  And it is amusing to examine all the detritus scrapped up by the snow plow and deposited on my lawn this winter into what was once a huge mountain of packed snow.  I finally found the Fitbit cover that I lost while snow-blowing in January.  Unfortunately, it had been crushed by the plow as well.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 126 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture-priority AE mode, 1/500th sec at f/10.0, with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Frazil and pancake ice on the shores of Fresh Pond, Cambridge, MA, April 8, 2015. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Yesterday was ridiculously cold and miserable.  So much so, that I left my camera behind and went out with the determination to finish my lunchtime walk as rapidly as possible but with enough distance to satisfy the Fitbit tyrant on my wrist.  Hmm! On the other hand conditions were perfect for all the glorious phenomena associated with melting ice.  More reassuring physics awe to sure.  So, to my delight yesterday there were ice pancakes on the pond, and I just couldn’t resist risking frozen fingers long enough to take a few IPhone images. Figure 1 is one of these images and I hope I may be excused the poetic license of a bit of over exaggerated color.  It was all so gloomy otherwise.

Pancake ice! Where does this come from? Well before I say anything more we have to realize that temperatures are such that the water world is ever on the edge of phase transition: ice to water and water to ice.  It is a precarious balance between entropy and enthalpy.  But most significantly, when you see physical structure, ice domains on the surface of a pond, like this you just know that somehow the root cause is going to be the interaction between water molecules on a scale way too small to see.  Therein, lies the reassuring awe that physics gives.

Ice crystals tend to form around particles in the water. It turns out that when things get really cold, but the water is in constant motion, these ice crystals are prevented from freezing into sheets and are pulled under the super-cooled water. Eventually they float to the surface and collect in round flat pancake like-blobs.  These blobs, called frazil, are prevented from further congealing by the currents, winds, and waves.  This is slush.  These pancakes will then cause further freezing where their edges are exposed to the water and as a result become raised.  The pancakes take on the appearance of great Victoria lilies.

Most interesting, perhaps, is that frazil and pancake ice are the start in Arctic regions of so-called sea ice.  Fresh Pond in the regard is a mini-North Pole, which is certainly what it felt like yesterday.