I’m a very inconsistent blogger. I was totally on a roll there, blogging all the time, and then a lull. It’s been hot again. This weekend I got sick of it being too hot to go to parks, so I did something extremely out of character and got up at 5:30 on Sunday morning in order to get to Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge when they opened, to beat the worst of the heat and to hopefully see more wildlife. I consider 5:30 a.m. more a bedtime than a rising time, but I shocked Mark and myself by actually doing it! It was hot anyway and honestly I don’t think I saw any more wildlife than I do there in the middle of the day, but in lieu of a food post, here are some pictures.

#1 thing I saw? Jackrabbits! SO MANY JACKRABBITS! They were all over the place!

Sometimes I take pictures that I think look like greeting cards. I’m thinking about making greeting cards from them! I could sell them on etsy, right?! Of course, this would entail purchasing a printer of some sort. I haven’t owned a printer since about 2002. But don’t you think this photo would be enhanced by some text that says “Happy Easter to a wonderful son-in-law!” or something in a nice script about the rabbit?

This is a terrible photo from a photography standpoint. The exposure is atrocious. In my defense, I was bracketing – taking lots of pictures with different exposures in the hopes of one of them being right – but I ended up liking this overexposed one more than the better exposed ones because LOOK HOW CRAZY THESE OSPREYS LOOK! They’re staring at me with their humongous eyes! LOOK AT THAT BABY! I didn’t even know he was in the nest until I got home and could look at the pictures on my computer – the nest is very high up and pretty far from the camera. So they so were far away I couldn’t even see the baby, but I know that baby could see me!

There was a lot of bumblebee action.

Closeup of the trumpet vine the bee is pollinating in the prior picture. What do you think: notecard?

I could have a series of wildflowers as notecards?

I decided that Queen Anne’s lace might be even more neat before it blooms.

But it’s pretty while blooming too.

So agrees this pearl crescent (or silvery checkerspot, I’m not sure) butterfly.

So this other guy and I arrived at the refuge at about the same time Sunday morning and without speaking, went in opposite directions. By coincidence, we got back to the parking lot at the same time three hours later, and this time we greeted each other. It turned out we both had the exact same camera and the same telephoto lens. He asked me if I got anything good; I didn’t really think so. Get this: he was all excited because he saw a raccoon! I thought that was fantastic! I was so excited to run into someone so excited to see a raccoon. He said he was slightly nervous because the raccoon got so close, and of course I had to blabber about being a raccoon rehabber and there’s no need to be nervous around raccoons because they are just extremely curious, not aggressive. Hopefully I didn’t sound like a jerk. Anyway, he showed me his pictures and he got some great shots of the raccoon. I was jealous! He also rattled off a long list of other animals he saw that I didn’t (although I DID see a beaver, who swam out of the shot at high speed). Next time I’m going in the direction this guy went, which is apparently where all the action is. I decided not to bore the guy with the 100 pictures of raccoons I had on my camera from the day before, but you guys don’t get off so easy. Since I missed the wild raccoon at the refuge on Sunday, here are some wild raccoons I saw on Saturday:

Haha, yeah, that’s a wild raccoon alright! It really IS a wild raccoon, but it’s Emmy, the surrogate mother I mentioned a few months ago, who is raising some of our orphans for us. As you can see, she’s right in my face. Most wild raccoons won’t actually get this close to a human, but Emmy knows and trusts us. (Emmy was rehabbed at the sanctuary a few years ago when she herself was orphaned.)

One or both of these raccoons peeping out of a nest box might be the youngsters Emmy is raising for us. I’m not entirely sure because there were about 20 wild raccoons on the deck I was on at the time and I can’t keep them all straight!