Anyone know what type of Hawk this is?

I have had a small hawk hanging around for a few weeks now, I got a really bad shot of one the other day and thought it may be a red tailed hawk, but yesterday this little guy was in the bush outside my kitchen window and I have had to crop the shot heavily to make him a decent size because it was a bit far away. He only gave me the opportunity to take this one shot. When he flew away I didnt see any sign of redness in his tail, but he was gone in a flash.

(Click on pic to enlarge)

This is the one I saw the other day but the quality of the shot is much worse as it was raining and overcast and even further away. I dont think it is the same bird but maybe I will get lucky soon and get a closer and better shot of one of them.
Lori

The View From My Kitchen Window - 29 March 2008

I keep hoping that the scene will start greening up quickly but with all this wet and mud we arfe still waiting, at least the horses are enjoying their roundbale of hay and finding somewhere to lay down without it being in the mud. I took this a few days ago, hopefully we will start seeing changes soon as the weather is warming up, it is overcast but in the 50s this morning when we woke.

I was hoping that this make for an interesting series but thus far nothing much has changed since I started LOL.

Lori

The View From My Kitchen Window - 19 March 2008

(Click on pic to enlarge)

First view 12 March

Well one week later and here is the view we have this afternoon. We have been having rain all day and night and as a result I have my regular pond in my pasture and mud everywhere. Horses are tired of being inside and I wish I could put them out but I want to give the grass at least a fighting chance at getting started out there without the hooves tearing everything up. The bottom end of the field from the left to the right behind the hill to where the telephone pole is, is a big lake.


Hope it stops raining soon it has made up for the drought we had last summer and more already and our rainy season hasnt even started!!!


Lori

Taxes - Wound Progress - Part 2

I didnt get to clean the wound today so a lot of the dirt around the wound you are seeing is from the mud when he has been running, but the wound is making fabulous progress. I am not surde yet if he will have a bald patch or not but I dont think it will be as big as I first thought it would be.


Lori
xx

The View From My Kitchen Window - 12 March 2008

I can always see the railway crossing and most of the field from the kitchen window and quite often I will just stand there and gaze out and watch what is happening, the horses, the birds or the weather, I just find it relaxing, so I decided today to do a series taken from this same spot every once in a while to see how different it looks at different times of the year.

So here is today's version, we started just below freezing and you can still see a bit of the snow on the ground, but we got up to the 50s and it was a glorious day. You can see how happy the horses were on my other blog http://prophotobylori.blogspot.com. This was taken earlier in the morning before I went out to feed them.

Hope you all had a great day. (((Hugs)))

Lori

Update on Taxes and his Accident

I took a few shots of Taxes this evening. He has been so good about flushing the wound but is not mad about having me removing the dead tissue and seems to have been taking pretty good care of keeping it clean himself. The skin is a nice healthy pink and I continue to spray it with the antibiotic spray and think it is doing really well. I managed to remove some of the black today and will just keep plugging away at it.

There is ice everywhere here and I dont want to risk him slipping on the ice and snow outside so I am having to put his leg into a bucket in order to flush the area and not get everything wet and he has been very good about that. The handling daily is also helping with his manners although he is still a brat and desperately wants to play with everyone and everything.

Will keep you posted.

Lori

Thinking of Spring

We are having yet more snow, although again we managed to dodge the worst of it, we have been lucky this year, there have been three big storms predicted to hit us and none of them have. Further north they have not been so lucky.

The photos today are hopefully going to brighten up your day if it needs brightening. I took these last summer out in the pasture. Strangely enough the one above looks like the milkweed plant flower that the Monarch buttterfly caterpillars feed off but it had totally different leaves and general structure. I even found one with a monarch caterpillar on it. Will have to do a bit of research as I thought that the milkweed was the only plant these caterpillars ate.
The one above was a tiny little weed, I had to lay on the ground to shoot it as it is only about an inch long, if anyone knows what it is please fill me in LOL.

Taxes is doing great, the wound looks aweful but he is full of his usual naughtiness again and lets me flush the wound with no problem with warm water and spray it with an antibacterial spray the vet gave me to use.

I put the horses in last night because of the storm warning so they will probably stay there til tomorrow. Our helper has made headway a bit in the barn and hopefully we will get it in ship shape by the end of the week again. Blue is already starting to shed his winter coat by the handfulls. I find that the white hair always sheds first, so all the horses with lots of white are shedding profusely.

Well thats my bit for the day, still hoping and praying that we will sell some horses soon to good homes, keep fingers and toes crossed for us LOL (((((Hugs)))))

Lori
xx

Taxes Treatment Day 1

I am very pleased with how he has responded to the flushing, I filled a gallon tub with warm water and flushed the wound out three times and he was soooooooo good. Then I sprayed it with an antiseptic spray and he didnt have a problem with that either. Good boy.


I will take pics every few days and then once a week to keep up with progress. Pics today are ones I posted before on my other blog when he was 3 months old and was playing with his Jolly Ball. He ran into the fence the next day and cut his back leg up.


Lori

Taxes Has Done It Again

(Click on pics to see larger images)

Well Mike your little buddy has been up to his tricks again. I was out feeding yesterday morning and had just put all the horses out and partitioned off the section where Taxes gets to have a bit more space and play over the partitions with the two other colts (MiKael calls it face boxing which I love). I was cleaning up and the next minute I looked up and this is what greeted me!!!!! I have hunted high and low to try to find out how he did this but cant find anything, no hair on something, no evidence at all.

That triangular flap at the bottom is just a flap of skin. At the top the muscle got torn a bit too but fortunately not too badly. We had two options, anaesthetise him (it is very very cold you can see the breath vapor in the top pic) and stitch him up and hope that he doesnt pull the stitches out, or leave it as it is and flush it with sterile water and use a clear antibiotic spray on it four or five times a day.

As most of you know, Taxes is a little tyrant and has a very strong personality so we decided on the leaving it and trying to keep it clean while it heals. It looks absolutely dreadful. He likes to bite everything so I know he will just have it all open again in an instant which is what happened when he cut his hind leg on the wire a few months back. The added bonus is that because it is still so cold we have no flies, which can be a terrible problem in the summer with open wounds.

So I will keep you posted on his progress here, but it is going to be a few months to get this fixed at least.

Lori

Unidentified Hawk

(click on pic to enlarge)

This is not a great picture because the bird was a long way away and I got as close to it as I could before the railway track started hiding it from view (that is what you can see in the foreground) It is also cropped drastically. Any idea which hawk this one is? For some reason I am having problems loading the pic. I have seen it around more, probably attracted by the sparrows that I feed.

Ball Python Feeding - Quite graphic Photos - Part 2

This shot was after he had worked his prey down into his gullet. As I said in my last post they usually get fed once a week and this was a medium sized mouse.

Lori

Ball Python Feeding - Quite graphic Photos

A friend of mine and her sister have a python which I have pictured in this series and two Boas. This snake is about 2 or 3 feet long so is still quite small and he gets fed every Tuesday. I am a staunch animal lover so this wasnt easy for me to document but I did, and it was in a small tank which made space to work a problem.

(Click on all pics to see larger versions)

After striking at the mouse and having its mouth around its middle the python curled itself around the throat area to suffocate the prey.
He then proceeded to unlock his jaws so that he could consume the mouse from the head first.
He had to stretch and ripple his neck and body to work the mouse down into his tummy.

I will post another picture in a second post of him after completely consuming the mouse.

Iam hoping to do something similar with the Boas, the one is about 6 foot long and the other about two feet long. I will post what I have of them in a seperate post.

Lori

Hummingbird Clearwinged Moth

I am battling to upload photos so only have these two, I will add to them later.

I have only seen these little guys twice and that was this summer, the first time I didnt have my camera, the second time I did and I took advantage of it. These little moths are only about an inch or so long and move like lightening flapping their wings as fast as a hummingbird, hence their name. There are other color vatiations, the one being the same except that it is all green. They belong to the same family as the Hawk Moths if I remember correctly, except the hawk moths dont have transparent wings.

(click on picture to enlarge)
One thing that I have noticed is that most of the shots I have seen of these little guys are with them on a pink or purple flower, wonder if that is significant. I will try to find some links and post them with the next batch of photos.

Nature is wonderful.

Lori

Taxes - Wound Progress - The Outcome

(Taken 6 November 2007)

(Click on picture to enlarge)

It has been a while since I posted an update on this wound. I didnt really photograph much during it's progress but here is what his leg looks like today, took this a few minutes ago. He has a bit of a lump where the scar is but as you can see it has healed really well, far better than I envisaged. Oh and bear in mind that as a typical stud colt (that needs to be gelded soon) he was trying to bite me and play with me the whole time I was trying to get this shot LOL.

Lori

Taxes - Wound Progress - Part 1

On 27th July in the morning my three and a half month old stud colt "Taxes" decided that he was going to go through the electric fence to visit with the 2 mares and gelding on the other side. I found him and turned the fence off, unhooked a section of wire and herded him under it onto the right side before we had a wreck. He was fine up until then. As I was reattaching all of the wire so that I could turn the fence on again he promptly went behind my back and suddenly was on the other side again!!! Again he was fine, don't know how he did it so easily but there he was. He and the two mares and gelding then decided to start racing up and down the field. As they came back up the hill he veered off towards his and his momma's pasture and hit the fence, tried to jump it and caught his left back leg in the top wire. He managed to shake it loose but not before he had cut himself really badly. There was a 5 inch flap of skin that had been ripped open. It didnt bleed so it was just the skin but I have had to deal with leg wounds and proud flesh before, that is another story which I will go into later.

I got the vet over immediately but he had already run back into their barn and had got into the sawdust so the vet knew he couldnt stitch it. My first problem was that I was leaving that night to photograph a welsh pony show 89 odd miles away and was due to spend two nights away. The vet told me that I needed to hose the leg for at least half an hour and then wrap it the way he had taught me the last time I had a leg injury. There lay the second problem, I have 20 horses and have not had the time to devote to this little guy and hadnt even got him halter broke so that was out of the question. He said to bandage it the best I could and deal with it when I got back home.

(Taken 27 July 2007 - Immediately after accident)

(Taken 27 July 2007 - Immediately after accident)

After spending an extremely hot weekend at the horse and pony show and worrying about my baby horse I got back home and managed to take the bandage off and see the damage(see below). The flap of skin had shrunk which I knew would happen and it didnt look as bad as I had feared so I started the long haul to healing this wound.

(Taken 30 July 2007)

(Taken 30 July 2007)

Padding and pressure is the key to dealing with leg wounds which always develop proud flesh in horses. If anyone would like to know how I go about it let me know and I will also go into it in more detail when I post about my other experience as I have pictures of it which I took before I knew what I was dealing with.

This is how it looked a few days ago, the black is the salve that I use on the wound but you can clearly see the new pink skin growth. It just remains a matter of time and patience and will probably leave a nasty scar but it could have been a whole lot worse.

Needless to say I will never leave a baby un halter broke again. It would have made life a lot easier but he learned fast and is a star. One good thing on both the occasions of dealing with this is that neither colts have chewed the bandage. That can give you a whole lot more headaches.

(Taken 15 August 2007)


(Taken 15 August 2007)
I will post the progress as I take the photos.

Lori

Butterfly identification

(Click on image to view larger)

I shot this last summer and would love to know if anyone knows what butterfly this belongs to.

Lori

Introduction

I find that on my Photo A Day Blog I often have more pictures to post, most of the time regarding animals, insects or even plants and don't want to clutter up the PAD blog with all the details, so I decided to create this one just for those cases. Also not everyone wants to see creepy crawlies LOL so they can decide if they want to visit or not.

This is also intended to be a information gathering mission so that I can learn more about the critters around me, so feel free to let me know if I have anything wrong in the information I have or add to the knowledge.

Thanks

Lori