A jay with attitude to be sure. When this was taken I had just stepped out onto the deck off of the kitchen and had inadvertently scared this bird off from the cat food it had been harvesting. You can see that he wasn't pleased and was actually a little ruffled.
Most of my friends who are gardeners really cringe when I show them pictures of these insects but I find them photogenic often. This was taken at the Mendocino Art Center
This was taken on Mendocino's Albion Street, in the middle of the street just a couple of blocks from the center of town. A garter snake trying to look fierce to scare me off. It actually struck towards the camera a couple of times. It seems to be spreading the back of it's head so that it looks triangular, mimicking the shape of the heads of poisonous snakes. Although in this image it looks as if it might be big, it's head was about the size of my thumb and it was about 18inches long. I shooed it off of the road into a vacant lot so it wouldn't become goo on the road from a passing car. Nice coloring.
For a time insects were frequent visitors to these daisies outside the kitchen. It was rubbing it's hands together in glee I guess but in the still image it looks as if it is praying.
We don't see very many any more but in year's past we had very frequent racoon visitors to our kitchen deck checking to see if we had forgotten to bring in the cat food. Sometimes we would see 4 or 5 a night often in groups of two or three. I'm not sure what has changed but they are infrequent visitors now.
