Author: hdarr

No story or theme for this post.  Just a mixed bag of recent photographs.

Since my last post, Margo and I have been to Mexico City and the Yucatan Peninsula where we saw several pyramids and other wonders.  We also visited the Bay Area, both coasts of Florida, NYC and most recently Maine.  You will see some travel pics in here along with the local photos.

Thanks for looking!

As 2022 is drawing to a close I thought I would share some of my favorite photographs from the last year.

Most, but not all, of the pics were taken during my ramblings along the C&O Canal here in Maryland.  And of course there are a lot of birds.  When I am out walking around I photograph what I find interesting, and what I find interesting is often birds.

I hope the photos will brighten up your day.  Happy holidays and have a great 2023!

It has been a year since Margo and I got our COVID vaccinations and started busting out of town.  We had pent-up travel urges that had to be unleashed.  I’m calling the trips we made in the past 12 months “vaccications.”

We braved the nation’s air travel system to go to San Francisco (to visit son Franky in Berkeley), Tucson (twice), Bar Harbor and San Diego.  We took the Vamoose bus to New York (to visit son Peter in Brooklyn) and returned on Amtrak’s Acela train.  It was a bit nerve-wracking to be crammed in with other travelers but we made it through uninfected.

All of the photographs in this post were taken with my iPhone 11 Pro Max, my preferred camera for travel.  Several months ago I got an app called Carbon for black and white conversions.  It has some cool filters and I particularly like it for making blue sky super dark as we used to do with red filters in the black and white film days.

You will notice an abundance of photographs of cacti.  What can I tell you?  I’m a sucker for succulents.

We have reached the one-year anniversary of the global COVID-19 pandemic.  Yay.  I am very grateful that I have reached this milestone relatively unscathed.  Margo and I got the one-shot vaccine Sunday so we are feeling hope for better times ahead.

During the past 12 months I have spent even more time strolling along in the C&O Canal National Historical Park, camera in hand.  Because my gym was closed I needed more walking as exercise, and I had plenty of time to do it.  With all the added time and miles spent on the canal I saw and photographed more interesting creatures than ever before.

The Park celebrated an anniversary of its own on Jan. 28 when it marked 50 years as a National Park.  Today I am posting photographs of birds and beasts taken in the park in the 52 weeks of the pandemic.  I tried to limit the selection to one photo per species with two exceptions.

I hope you enjoy a little escape through these photographs.

Remember travel?  I barely do.  OK, I know some of you have continued to jet around despite the coronavirus, but I have not been on a plane in a year.  Margo and I drove to the Delaware shore for three days of sea and sand and tattoo viewing, but that hardly counts as travel.

A couple of months ago Margo wrote about a trip we took to Italy in 2000 for her blog Margo on the Go.  In looking for photos to go with her story I found some medium-format black-and-white negatives that I hadn’t looked at in 20 years.  Scanning those old photographs inspired me to go back through the Darrchives and put together a collection of travel photographs from long ago.

Most of these pix are from personal travel.  A few were taken while on assignment for USA TODAY but fit today’s travel theme.  The Italy photos from 2000 are the most recent.

If I can’t literally travel, at least I can travel back in time through these photographs.

It’s April Fools’ Day but no time for joking.  The world is in the grip of a pandemic of COVID-19.  Fortunately I have still been able to get out for nature walks without violating the Maryland stay-at-home order.

Five years ago, after I retired from full-time employment, I started going on long walks to clear my head and get a little outdoor activity.  I was drawn to the C&O Canal towpath because it is convenient and scenic.  Pretty quickly I started bringing a camera with a long zoom lens to photograph the birds and creatures I saw along the way.  What started out as a low-impact exercise regimen  turned into a photography project.

The stay-at-home order allows going outside for exercise, so I am still OK hitting the towpath.  The C&O National Historical Park has closed some of the popular parking areas and access points, but so far I have not been deterred.  I don’t think the Park Service can close off the whole canal, and I hope they won’t.  My strolls are important to my mental as well as physical health.

My walks are leisurely.  I rarely hike.  I love this quote from John Muir:

“I don’t like either the word [hike] or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not ‘hike!’ Do you know the origin of that word saunter? It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the middle ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre’, ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.”

All but one of these photographs were taken along the canal in the past few months.  I included one of a mallard in flight from Huntley Meadows Park in Alexandria, Va. that I took about a month ago.

Thanks for looking.  I will be sauntering.

Over the past four years I have made many trips to Conowingo Dam to photograph the bald eagles. The downstream side of dam on the Susquehanna River near Darlington, Md. is a rich fishing spot for the eagles. There is a population of bald eagles that nest in the area but many more join them in late fall and early winter.

These photographs span from my first trip in November 2015 to this month. I have only gone in November, December and early January. Some trips yielded a variety of nice photos and others not so much. You just never know what you will see.

Note that only adult bald eagles have the distinctive white head and tail feathers.