More Summer Activities 2017

Jordan posted these pictures on August 6, near the end of her stay in the Quito, Ecuador area. I'm guessing that this is around the Volcano Pululahua that we visited on the 2015 trip to Ecuador.

It certainly looks like they have found a rocky route.

August 11. This is a cause for praise as Philippe and Mary Sue visit Dorothy in Newport. Rod and Brenda visited her on July 23-25 when she had just returned to the Lindley care center after a heart crisis. We praise the Lord that she is much better now and able to joke with Philippe about the Possum Grape, Arkansas T-shirt that she had bought him. Rod and Brenda had gone by after their trip to Pearl River and Jeff and Darla's return from Alaska.

On the afternoon of August 15 we had the pleasant surprise of a Monarch butterfly visiting our butterfly bush. I believe this is the first Monarch that we have ever seen at our location in almost fifty years! We had heard of a few viewings of Monarchs on the east side of Atlanta, but thought that we were completely off their flyway.

This lone Monarch showed signs of having been buffeted about a bit, but he was still spectacular.

I was pleased to see that the Monarch was actually feeding on our butterfly bush. You hear that they eat only milkweed, and people plant milkweed just for the purpose of attracting them, but he seems happy with our butterfly bush.

With beauty like this, it's hard to stop posting pictures. This one has the curiosity that the proboscis is clearly visible, and that he seems to have missed the flower with this particular probe! Maybe that's a good time to stop, when the elegant Monarch starts missing his target. These photos were shot at about f16, synced at 1/250sec.

On this same afternoon, this hummingbird was more cooperative than usual in just hanging in the air near the feeder. The flash I was using with the Monarch definitely didn't work through the glass of the door, so I was shooting at 70mm, 1/1000 sec, down at about f5.6. I was having to try to manually focus since he was moving so rapidly and the camera would tend to switch focus to distant background objects.

You can see that even 1/1000 of a second shutter speed is not fast enough to stop those wings.

Even with a 1/1000 second shutter speed you can't stop the wings. But you can see configurations that you don't normally see with your eye because the wings look like a blur. It was quite a privilege to see these two very different flying things in one afternoon. Praise the Lord!