Crittercam: The new girls

    I've been remiss. It's been two months since I last posted anything here. the reasons for my neglect are complex and diverse. If you are well enough acquainted with my recent history, you may already understand some of them. I hope you will not take it personally that I chose not to describe them here. I'd just like to take a moment to apologize to the regular readers of my blog . Ill try to be more consistent in my posting habits from now on...for both of you!

    As you may already know I keep a small zoo in my apartment. It currently consists of a lizard,a tree frog, some fish and birds. I don't ordinarily write about them because quite honestly they don't do very much that's interesting. I also don't want this to turn into one of those bizarre obsessive blogs that catalog every detail of the lives of somebody's pets. I figure enough people already don't read this thing.

   Having said that, occasionally something cool does happen with the menagerie that I'd like to share even if I'm the only person who's interested. Such is the case today. Today I finally got a pair of female Lady Gouldian finches. I've had two males for a while now and have been looking for potential mates for my boys for a couple years (living in a small town in Upstate NY may have it's advantages, but it does make it a little challenging to obtain exotic birds). I thought it would be a nice way to ease back into posting to put up a few shots of my birds. The birds had different ideas about that. I picked out some of the better pictures of my uncooperative little subjects from today. Bear in mind none of this is what you'd exactly call "great photography" 

The breeder I went to had a lot of cool mutations and color variations available. I stuck as close to the "standard" variations as possible. I like holotypes. The black headed variety is apparently more common in the wild and the red heads are more common in captivity. Gouldian Finches are endangered in their wild habitat. It should be mentioned here that Australia has had a very sensible export ban in place for it's native fauna since 1959. Since finches in general only live about 15 years, and since the person i brought them from is extremely reliable and keeps flawless breeding records, I can guarantee that my birds are captive bred. 

 I like this one, I have no idea what they're looking at

 This is about 10 to 25 percent of what you wind up with when photographing birds: a blurry picture of where the bird was a fraction of a second ago

 Occasionally, and for no readily apparent reason, an animal will suddenly decide that they really hate photography and will do everything in their power to ruin every shot you try to take of them, even going so far as to spontaneously run into pictures of other animals just to make them blurry and unusable. This was the last good picture I was able to get of the black headed one for about an hour.

 Meeting their new cage mates

 A rare family portrait showing all my finches. There are a pair of zebra finches, spice finches and a society finch that share a large flight cage with my Gouldies.

 From left to right: My male Society finch (I'm trying to find a girlfriend for him), the new girls, a female Spice finch and my female Zebra (Her chest is bald because her mate plucks at it. I tried to remove her so that she could regrow her feathers once, but she sulked and was so miserable that I relented and put her back. I'd rather have her look miserable than actually be miserable. I guess that proves finches can be just as stupid as people!)

 Here is my redhead girl next to one of the males. You can really see the difference here!

 I managed to line up a good  picture of the black headed one... then she mooned me.

                                                                   Gotcha!

Self Portrait Volume I.5: The contents of my luggage.

       We live in an increasingly narcissistic and shallow age. Never before in the history of our species has communication been so easy. With our amazing technical advancements we are capable of broadcasting every detail of our lives, and every thought that crosses our minds to the entire world and giving it the weight of real importance. Worse still, the system has become self perpetuating. Not only are we capable of telling the world what we had for breakfast with the click of a button, but other people can weigh in with their own superficial opinions on the trivialities of our lives, thus adding fuel to the fire of our egotism.
Personally I find this crude intolerable and disgusting.

I will be damned if I let everyone else hog all of the attention!

    As a person who travels for a living, I ordinarily spend very little time thinking about packing. I just throw whatever book I'm reading, a sketchpad , my laptop, some toiletries and the appropriate amount of black clothing in a bag, grab the fiddle case on the way out the door, and I'm ready to go. Preparing for Arizona was different. I had to make sure I was ready for several different climate conditions and had casual clothing as well as "show blacks". I also had to make certain that I had enough things to keep me amused for three weeks, including endless hours in the passenger seat of a car. Perhaps because i'm working on my self portrait, and am slightly more conscious of the question of identity that I realized the assembled items actually provide insight into my personality.  Here, in short are the things I didn't want to be without for three weeks. I shall spare you the boring stuff like clothes and such. note to the makers of any of the items pictured: I will happily endorse the living daylights out of  your products. You just have to pay me lots of money first!

What I packed:
*My bike
*My fiddle
*Books: The Mythic Image-Joseph Campbell, Birds Of the Western U.S., The Tempest- William Shakespeare, Walden- Henry David Thoreau, A book of short stories by Robert Heinlein (borrowed from my roommate), 300 Fiddle tunes.
*Two packages of my favorite pens
*Large contact juggling ball
*Billiard ball (also for contact juggling. This is my pre-show warm up)
*Block of soapstone
*Several blocks of wood (Maple and Basswood)
*Selection of wood carving tools and sharpening stones in tool roll
*Tool roll with rasps and stone carving tools
*Large sketch pad
*Pad of bristol board
*Pad of watercolor paper
*Roll containing various drawing tools and brushes
*Box set of watercolors
*MP3 player
*Mouse puppet
*Laptop (Okay, its like this: My friend who sold me this computer never mentioned it was yellow until I had already agreed to buy it. It used to belong to his girlfriend apparently. So you see, I had little choice but to paint it with the Taxi cab pattern).  
*(not pictured for obvious reasons) Digital camera

Filler

For reasons that might become apparent later, I have something specific in mind for my eleventh blog post. This means I have to get the tenth one out of the way to make it fit properly. So....here are some pictures of a lizard

 Her name is Cecelia. She is an African Fat-tailed Gecko.

 You can see why they are called that.

 Fat-tails are comparatively docile and easy to keep. They don't mind being handled and are attractive little lizards, so they're pretty popular as pets

 She has a pretty cute face too.

Well, that's about it. Thanks for tuning in.