Wild Westhampton

The Eggs in the Nest
Westhampton Beach, NY
21 May 2010

As soon as I can get the photos processed from today, there will be a post (well, likely a series) entitled:

How I Spent My Presidents Day; or, When First I Saw a Muskrat

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The Icicles on the Snow Castle
22 December 2009
Quiogue, NY

The Twig in the Ice
22 December 2009
Quiogue, NY

The Empty Shell on the Leaves
06 October 2009
Quogue Wildlife Refuge, Quogue, NY

I posted the very first post of Wild Westhampton — The Deer in the Creek.

When I started, I didn’t expect much. Post a few pictures, tell a few stories, maybe get three readers to amuse on a regular basis. Mostly, I started to amuse myself, and to give myself an outlet that would challenge me to better my skills. I think, in that way, I have mostly been successful.

Here we are, one year later. We’re coming up on 500 posts, the magically numbered post probably occurring within the next two months. On the Beach wrote a post about this blog, and the Southampton Press even ran a story. Pretty darn cool.

I feel much stronger in making bird identifications (as well as butterflies and dragonflies) because I do a lot guide checking before making most of my ids for the posts here. I’m not always right. Often, I’m corrected, or I can’t find an id and ask for help. Running this blog has not only been a fun experience, but it has been an educational one as well.

Some folks follow links from other blogs to get here, while others are led here by Google and other search engines by keyword search. Some of the more popular searches are for Wildwood State Park & Cupsogue Beach (followed by “magical places”, “dining needles”, and “river monsters”). Some of the strangest things people seem to be searching for: “origami modular”, “deer standing in truck”, “eagle+goose”, “hermaphrodite genitalia”, “biggest deer still living in the world”, “starfish nose” and “dirty koala”. One person’s search for high tide times in Quogue led them here (I suggest here).

Just a housekeeping note… If you link to Wild Westhampton, please use wildwhb.com, not the WordPress version (the latter will still take you to wildwhb.com, but it will not look as tidy).

There are few things I like to do better than go out with my camera and shoot the world around me. As a result, I have close to 50,000 photos from the last four and a half years of my life: some terrible, some great, some that bring nostalgia for places and people I have not seen in a while. A great bulk of those are nature photos — whether from chasing alligator lizards in the desert or stalking egrets from the reeds on Dune Road.

I have a great many from this summer past that I have yet to share, and a greater many still yet to process and upload. I could process them swiftly over the next two days, and do a tremendous amount of postings over the next few weeks — if I did four or five posts a day, it would still likely take me a month or two to get through just the ones I have drafted already.

But winter is coming. In the winter, I slow down. I may take a picture or two of an icicle, or of the first snow fall, but mostly I am indoors with family and friends, or else taking photos of the dogs romping around in the backyard (they are cute when they romp, but those photos would get tiring).

So to get through this winter with an even amount of interesting posts, I have decided not to be as seasonally conscious as I have tried to be in the past. I’m not going to post like a maniac for a few months and then post hardly anything at all. I’m going to try to mix up different sets of photographs as much as possible, as usual, but I have so many sets at this point that this will result in a very large spread of time between photographs of the same set.

I’m also coming up on my next vacation, and will be attempting to do this time what I failed to do last time — a good mix of photos from vacations past, vacations present, and regularly scheduled posts. I already have the vacations past & regularly scheduled posts scheduled. It just remains to be seen whether or not I will have time to do the present ones as well when I am away.

Another article from the Southampton Press, this time from this week’s issue, provides an interesting read on the recent trend of oak deaths in the pine barrens. Read it over at 27East or pick up a Press.

The Gaggle of Geese
12 May 2009
Quogue, NY

Spotted this fellow swimming in the duck pond when I went to go look for osprey. Cormorants are a pretty common sight around here in the summer. (Unfortunately for the species, they are becoming too common in general, and many states, New York included, have programs in place to help control the populations in order to prevent conflict with other bird populations and recreational fisheries. For more information, go straight to the horse’s mouth at the Department of Environmental Conservation.)

The Cormorant at the Pond
12 May 2009
Westhampton Beach/Quiogue, NY