Saturday, March 26, 2016

Restoring Bottomland Prairie, March 2016: Coyote after Burn

The Creek Field burned on March 17, 2016, and for days afterward the field was surrounded by hawks, of many different species.  My efforts to photograph them yielded only blurs. 

More willing to be photographed was this coyote who was after the same smorgasbord of newly exposed mice, voles, shrews, cotton rats, pocket gophers, & bunnies.   

After the first long-distance shots, I drove as close as I could get to the Creek Field, with Deci in the bed of the truck.   

Note how Deci is quiet at first.  She starts barking only when Coyote grabs a wriggling something and starts to chomp it down.   Coyote keeps eating, tolerating the barking.  But he freezes when I tell Deci to hush.   Barking and talking?  That's too much!

As always, I am stunned by the power of fire.  Slow changes suddenly speed up, become transformations too rapid & too many to see, hear, count, or comprehend.  

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