Yesterday we had some visitors in the backyard, Pine Grosbeaks. It didn’t matter how close to them I got with the camera, they were not about to leave their feast.

The males are red and gray…

And the females are yellow and gray…

For those of you who don’t have snow today, here was a view from a local hiking spot I went to yesterday.

We didn’t go anywhere for Christmas this year, but the cat kept us entertained. He doesn’t need presents, just the wrapping paper will do.

Unfortunately I have not been able to spend very much time with the camera in the last couple weeks. Hopefully I will be able to get some nice photos over this extended holiday weekend, but in the meantime I figured I would post some photos from a couple months ago of some gulls.

We watched this first gull for about 10min as it was picking up and dropping clams from 30 ft up on the rocks, trying to break them open.

I caught a hitchhiker in my bathroom this week…

There wasn’t a bum or anything like that in my bathroom, it was a pseudoscorpion, which is a tiny little arachnid. Usually you find them in leaf litter or decaying wood material. I think this little friend probably hitched a ride on me in from the woods as they often practice phoresy.

For some reason I had it in my mind that they only used those pincers for transportation and that they fed on decaying matter. But upon further investigation I found that not to be the case at all. They have a venom gland in the pincer (or pedipalp I guess is the correct term) that they use in capturing and immobilizing prey. To aid in digestion, they spit up a fluid that liquefies the prey in order to ingest it.