I am asking each of you for a favor…when you have a minute to either make a post to this blog - which I will then forward to Lorraine, or to send her an email at sandflea@comcast.net and just say hello, give her words of encouragement, a smile, or any kind of message at all.

We all know the power of nature to heal us…. and we also know the awesome power of love and support from family and friends that helps lift each of us through difficult times.

We recently spent a week up in Moosehead Lake in Maine - from start to finish we had a blast! I had planned this trip as a surprise for Lorraine for her birthday! We packed up the car with Lorraine’s plein air painting gear, my camera gear, binoculars, clothes, and whatever else we thought we might need and off we went! I asked her to plug in Greenville, ME in the GPS and off we went! We had a very easy ride up - we left on a Tuesday and no one was on the road.

Finally I have some more New Zealand photos for you! I’ll start with our next to our last night on the North Island. Lorraine and I hired a guide to take us to try and find a kiwi! Kiwi’s are nocturnal (very occasionally they can be seen in the daylight). Our guide John met us at 9pm… that is our normal bedtime! But we were very excited to go out with him and give it our best try. He picked us up in a Range Rover and gave each of us headlamps. He had us sit in the front and back seat on the passenger side, roll down our windows, and look out to the side with our headlamps on…

am very, very excited to share this post with all of you! I hope that you enjoy these photos and my story. Beginning last summer it has seemed like I have been in a game of Hide and Seek with bitterns over at Ragged! I have spent countless hours in this game…. and yesterday it all came together in a way that is more than I could have ever hoped for!! This will be a long post as I have a lot to share with you from this very special morning…I will never forget this experience - truly remarkable.

“Hope is the thing with

feathers that perches in the

soul and sings the tune

without the words - and

never stops at all.”

- Emily Dickinson

These last few days I have been going to Ragged with a very specific dream in mind … I wanted to see and photograph both an Indigo Bunting and a Common Yellowthroat on a gorgeous plant that is new to me. I know that seems like quite the dream… first of all to even see the Indigo Bunting, and second of all, for it to land on a specific plant…. But hey, that’s what dreams are right?? :). Why not dream big!

Well, the third morning I finally spotted an Indigo bunting after waiting a very long time in one spot, and I mean a very long time.

Wow!! I have never seen or been in an area with more deer flies than today - UGH!!!! I went to my usual Ragged Mtn area and things started off good - a little humid, but not too bad. I ventured up to a new area I have started to explore when all of a sudden I had so many deer flies buzzing me I could not believe it! Seriously, right out of a horror movie! So needless to say I left that area as quickly as I could hoping I could walk out of the “cloud “of deer flies… and I eventually I did!

This past week we arrived in NH for the summer. On our first full day here I went over to Ragged Mtn in the mid-afternoon to check on things to get ready for the next morning’s early outing. As soon as I parked the car and started out to my usual trails and paths I spotted this gorgeous, and huge, feather! It measures approx. 17 inches… Do you have any idea who this belonged to? Really incredible… My guess.. A Great Horned Owl??? Or????

Wow!! Every year our feathered friends pop with breeding plumage colors that are truly hard to believe! I am nursing some tendonitis in my right wrist from all of my time with camera, so I am picking my mornings very carefully! I obsessively check the forecast for temps, wind, and the time of the sunrise and then I plan my attack! :). Needless to say June mornings are my earliest mornings of the year - that beautiful old sun sure does rise early in June!

I will say upfront that this is a long post because during this particular morning one incredible thing happened after another and I could not find a good spot to split this into to two posts. If you do find this is too long - please let me know as I sincerely appreciate all of your feedback!

On this particular May morning I went out to Hatches Harbor at low tide via the Fire Road - I went out very early and as I started my walk out it was very quiet - beautiful, but quiet. Alll of a sudden I felt eyes on me…

On this rainy Memorial Day I am trying to cull through more for you… Here is another morning at Beech Forest - it started with a burst of sunshine immediately followed by gray skies. I started by walking the loop counterclockwise and saw movement to my right to see this very, very busy red squirrel! Now that is a mouthful!! :)

Today’s post is combination of a couple of outings to Beech Forest in Ptown with Lorraine and my first early morning Spring outing at Bullitt Reservation in Ashfield. It is so much fun to go out this time of year to find the birds who have come up on southerly winds and land like gentle rain throughout our state as they make their way north!

Each year a fox has had her kits near, in or around the dunes, not far from the parking area. Years ago, I saw them one morning and had no luck with shots so I vowed to myself to look each Spring, in hopes of better luck… Well, this week I scored! I had gone several times and saw where they were but never had the right light. But I so enjoyed watching them playing, jumping, pouncing and rolling around - all while Mom looked on from a little higher up in the dunes. I asked Lorraine if she would like to go see them just before sunset because I knew the light would be perfect and if they were out we would be in for a treat - she said yes and there they were!

This post will take you through one glorious morning at the Sandhill Crane nest in Ashfield! Our schedule limited me to only one morning during the current nesting season… and what a morning it was! Last Friday I set the alarm for 4:20 in order to get to Ashfield to be in position before sunrise. Conditions were forecasted to be perfect and they were - 26 degrees, zero wind and no bugs! As I walked through the woods to get to my position I felt the cold air emanating from the ground and all around me was absolute silence.

I went out two mornings in a row last week and had the most extraordinary early morning displays of Cape light - truly left me breathless!! I kept thinking that things seemed to me to be lining up for a chance of very special light as a huge Nor’easter was brewing… these two mornings were more than I could have hoped for! Let’s start with the first morning at Herring Cove. Just as I set up my camera and tripod in the parking lot a spectacular shooting star appeared right above me and fizzled out over the water -

You are in for a treat if you would like to look at a very rare and pre-historic bird! Let me introduce you to the incredible Takahe! This bird was thought to be extinct by the late 1800’s…. but was miraculously found by an intrepid explorer/birder sometime in the mid-1950’s. He had searched and searched and found a very small group of them on the South Island in one of its many undiscovered valleys. One very small group of these birds was re-located to the Hawke’s Bay Area on the North Island.

This post is a long one because what you are going to see is truly remarkable and precious. Please enjoy when you have time to sit back and relax - I have tried my best to make this worth the extra time looking through this post.

Before we left for NZ I had read about the tiny New Zealand Dotterels. They are in the plover family and approximately the same size as our Piping Plovers.

Today’s post is a break from New Zealand - still working on those for you! Yesterday afternoon I was at Wellfleet Harbor and I had a blast watching 3 red breasted mergansers diving! This type of merganser is about 20 inches in length and has a slim long body for diving and they have a serrated bill.

I am picking up right where we left off from the last post… right after I took that last shot of the young chick flapping his or her wings! I looked to my left and could see just beyond some bushes that the sun was just kissing the top of a huge rock and that some gannets were in that spotlight!

A little bit about gannets… first of all these are Australian gannets - very similar in appearance to the ones I have seen through binoculars way out in the sea diving for fish from the shores of Cape Cod. Gannets spend about 80% of their lives out on the open sea living solitary lives. Just thinking about that totally amazes me…