Located 15 min­utes south of Fort Collins, Coyote Ridge is a nat­ural area con­sist­ing if a cou­ple hun­dred acres of prairie. A trail runs from the road up across sev­eral ridges. Today, I walked to the base of the sec­ond ridge before com­ing back. I’ll make the full hike to the end some time in the future.

The weather today was over­cast and gloomy, so my cam­era was strain­ing with the avail­able light. Still, I took a few nice pho­tos. Here’s the walk from start to fin­ish, with nar­ra­tion and sev­en­teen pho­tos:

First thing this morn­ing, after check­ing for jobs on the job boards, I headed to the North Shields Ponds. This is my default loca­tion. Things were dark and gray and not photo-friendly. I felt vaguely down, but the over-excited red-wing black­birds that kept swoop­ing at me to pro­tect their nests cheered me up a lit­tle. I was stand­ing next to the river, dis­ap­pointed with the lack of wildlife in the area when I turned and caught sight of this:

This osprey was keep­ing an eye on the rapidly mov­ing water below, but due to the storms that passed through the night before, he wasn’t find­ing much to eat. Shortly after I took this shot, he spread his wings and swooped away, tak­ing my breath with it. His wingspan seemed immense, big­ger than an eagle. I wished that I could have got­ten closer.

Chirping at me in an almost chastis­ing man­ner, directly over­head, was a robin:

It posed so won­der­fully as soon as I turned to look that I almost felt like I was being set up. Still, I took the pic­ture, and it turned out pretty good. Anybody can shoot a nice photo of a robin, but at this point in the morn­ing, I was des­per­ate for some­thing to cap­ture on mem­ory card. As you’ll see, things got better.

On my way back to the car, I found this flower in bloom on a shrub.

I dis­cov­ered that my on-camera flash can illu­mi­nate my sub­jects with­out spe­cial attach­ment when using the 300mm lens. This was a good dis­cov­ery to make. It makes the lens even more flex­i­ble for me.

I went home briefly to pick up my tri­pod and then con­tin­ued south to a nat­ural area that I had heard about, but never vis­ited. Daniel Ausema told me that I would find plenty of prairie dogs there, and I’ve been want­ing to try out my new lens on the cau­tious lit­tle critters.

At first, I didn’t see much. Prairies always look almost like deserts to me when I first arrive. It takes me a while to accli­mate and re tune my senses to the ecosys­tem. I’ve spent more time in prairies than any­where else, but here, it’s a dif­fer­ent kind of prairie–short grass as opposed to the tall grass stuff I grew up around back in Kansas. The first thing I became aware of were the mead­owlarks singing their dis­tinc­tive song all around me. I searched the area for them, but they hide well, and don’t like to perch out in the open very often. They are on my hit list still, but I will cap­ture one with the lens soon. This is as close as I could get:

Off in the dis­tance, I saw half a dozen crows clus­tered together on the ground. I thought maybe there was a dead ani­mal out there, so I hiked out to take a look. I smelled some­thing, but I couldn’t find the body. It’s not that I wanted to take a pic­ture of it–but I would have liked to have set up on the spot if I had the time and wait for some­thing to come in and feed.

On the hike, I started to notice these white flow­ers that were very del­i­cate. I hadn’t ever seen them before.

It’s called a prickly poppy. I should have guessed that it was a poppy, because I took some poppy pic­tures last year in my back yard at the old place.

I hap­pened to bring my FL-36 flash and a wire­less kit with me. I played around with using dif­fer­ent angle of light on this flower, prob­a­bly spend­ing 20 min­utes just shoot­ing it. I’m glad I had my tri­pod, or it would have taken even longer. I just love the yel­low against the white.

Wandering onward, I started to see these yel­low flow­ers that once again, I had not seen before.

This is a com­mon evening prim­rose. Nothing very com­mon about them if you ask me. I played around with my off-camera flash a lit­tle more. I wished that I had two flashes with me, but my kit with tri­pod is heavy enough with­out adding even more equipment.

Bored with flow­ers, I climbed over the first ridge and found a colony of prairie dogs. They chirp end­lessly when you’re within a hun­dred yards, only with­draw­ing into their bur­rows to hide if you get within 15 feet or so. Some were so busy feed­ing that I could walk right up to them and take shots. I noticed sev­eral large fam­i­lies of younglings that were just delightful.

I won­dered if there was a preda­tor in the area that I couldn’t see because they most def­i­nitely were not focus­ing their atten­tion on me in these shots. I looked around, but couldn’t see any­thing. Which doesn’t mean there wasn’t some­thing out there. Even in short grass prairie, preda­tors can blend in.

They almost reminded me of meerkats in the way that they were clus­ter­ing together. Eventually, I started to feel bad about get­ting them all worked up, so I moved on, but not before stick­ing my cam­era lens down a bur­row to see what I could see. I don’t know what I was expect­ing, but it wasn’t this:

A cou­ple of dung bee­tles mak­ing work of, er, some­thing. Look, you take the good with the bad when you view my wildlife pho­tog­ra­phy. One thing peo­ple for­get about the wild is how much ani­mal poop there is lay­ing around. Moving on.

The prairie dog adults are much fat­ter than the lit­tle ones, and they almost seem to have per­son­al­i­ties when they watch you, cock­ing eyes, stand­ing on their feet. They’re so easy to anthro­po­mor­phize with their behav­iors, much like this grand fat boy:

Finally, I passed through the prairie dog colony and started to come up on a cabin that the local park ser­vice uses for com­mu­nity out­reach and class­room edu­ca­tion. There were benches where I could sit and rest my throb­bing feet, so I made a bee line for them. This lit­tle fel­low, calm as can be and so tiny, stopped me in my tracks:

I’m going to guess that this jack rab­bit wasn’t more than a year old. It seemed young and strangely accli­mated to peo­ple, but if it was liv­ing around the cabin, I sup­pose that makes sense.

I checked the time at the cabin and real­ized that I really needed to head back. To keep myself on track and not dis­tracted, I packed up my cam­era into my bag and began the hike back to the car. Of course, after hav­ing done so, the mead­owlarks began land­ing ten feet away from me and singing right out in the open. Oh, I’ll get you next time, you lit­tle bastards.

On the drive home, I turned past the pond in City Park, which is only a cou­ple of blocks away from our new place. Standing in the mid­dle of the pond on a float­ing log was a great blue heron, a bird that’s been on my to-shoot list since I got my cam­era lens. To my amaze­ment, as I tried and failed to get a good shot, he flew over to the shore. I slowly crept up on him, hid­ing in the bushes and keep­ing trees between us unless I was tak­ing a shot.

Joggers came by and star­tled it into flight a cou­ple of times:

But it set­tled back down and allowed me to take a few more shots.

I took one last shot, hop­ing for the best regard­ing expo­sure, given how over­cast every­thing was, and then headed home to get to work.

So that’s what I did on the morn­ing of day four of being job­less. How was your day?

Tagged as: 30-700mm lens, birds, coyote ridge, flowers, osprey, Photography, photowalk, prairie dogs, rabbits, wild flowers, wildlife