Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Early Morning Mist

One-a-Day Photo Challenge
Day Sixteen:  Morning

I took this photo of a treetop just beyond my back fence early yesterday morning, when the air was damp but not actively dripping for a change, and I could take the camera outside without damaging it.


It's raining again this morning, so a picture of the same scene today would look slightly blurrier.

Actually, the image above is a fairly accurate representation of my relationship with mornings. I'm not a morning person. I like mornings just fine, but the early hours aren't the best part of my day. My mind is misty then, like the sky in the photo, and my  thoughts shoot off in all directions, criss-crossing each other without apparent direction,  the way these branches do. That makes me a slow starter. It takes a little time--and often a little caffeine--for the mist in my head to burn away.

At the moment, while I'm clearheaded, I'm taking a closer look at this photo and noticing all those dark clumps in the treetop. Are they nests? If so, I hope they're bird nests and not those of some other, less desirable creature. They appear to be made of mud. And look how many there are, all clustered together in the tallest part of the tree like some sort of avian, high-rise condos.

I've just now searched on the Internet and in the Audubon bird guide book, trying to figure out what kind of birds build nests like these, but those searches were cursory and unsuccessful. If you know the answer, will you tell us, please? Otherwise, this could end up as one more unanswered question among those that already clutter up my foggy morning brain.

3 comments:

  1. Yikes on those clumps. Can you get a closer photo? I found this site that may give you more info. This is from Forest Health Protection, Southern Region

    http://www.fs.fed.us/r8/foresthealth/pubs/oakpests/p33.html

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  2. Alison, I think you may be right. It's too muddy to get back there and get a detailed close-up shot, but I can't find anything online that resembles what I can see more closely than the oak galls in your link. Ewww!

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  3. This post has become a target of spammers. Though Blogger's spam filter is preventing all the spammed comments from posting, I still have to deal with the email message each one generates; therefore, I'm closing comments on this post for now. Maybe the spammers will go away.

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