On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Good morning everyone,
Today we return to a wonderful place and time, the before-time before the New Now. But first, a few important words.
Have a great weekend – look, smile, rejoice, and prepare: the next 8-9 days will really challenge us domestically and the next few weeks will be horrible in many ways.
There are lurking hordes of infected across the country, everywhere. Not literally, but there are many infected all around, and so in a few days, they will beget hordes of infected that will show quite apparently in hospitals everywhere. Health care system stress will begin to overwhelm in many areas within a day or two of the surge beginning.
Stay in if you can and limit you and your family’s exposure to others, especially in groups, for the next 2-6 weeks. No joke. It’s that serious and for that long, at least. Prepare without panicking because that won’t do you any good. But do prepare, that will do you a lot of good.
Stay away from other people – 12 to 15 feet – and ensure you wash your hands for at least 20 seconds with soap and water multiple times a day, even more so if you encounter lots of other people closely. Wave but do not fist-bump or elbow-bump as those both get you too close. Stay 12 or more feet away from others.
No groups, no teams, no choirs, no reunions, no conferences, no meetings, no outings, no tours, no theater, no movies, no opera, no symphony, no museum, etc.
No cruises, flights, bus trips, train trips. Be careful in taxis, Lyfts, and Ubers. Do not touch surfaces you haven’t cleaned and sanitized.
Avoid any gathering of 100 people or more. Really, avoid any groups if you can – if we all stayed away from each other for 10 days, it would be over, but we’re people and not robots, so do what you can because some jackholes will be irresponsible.
Do not touch any strange or unclean surface and then your face. In fact, do not touch your face at all. This takes practice. Take advantage of the time you have now to retrain yourself, in a couple of weeks it will help you not make the simple mistake that will then infect you. Wearing bulky gloves around the house or office can force you to re-map your hand-to-face interactions.
Alcohol-based hand sanitizer of at least 60% alcohol concentration can be used to sanitize hands by rubbing it into the hands until it evaporates or is absorbed, but that is a “until I can get to a sink to use soap and water” stopgap.
Soap and warm-to-hot water for a vigorous, thorough hand-finger-thumb-back-of-the-hand-under-fingernail scrub for at least 20 seconds then rinse is best for cleaning your hands of viruses and bacteria. Soap literally destroys the lipid-based virus cell walls like a drop of Dawn dispels grease in a soaking pan in the sink.
For the next 2-6 weeks, we’ll be living a different reality than we have in memory, so the sooner you embrace that idea, the better it will go for you. More and more things will shut down as the days progress – schools, travel, business, worship,and the like. Large facilities are going to be repurposed into health care and recovery facilities, and lots of folks will be repurposed to health care and support. Dorms may end up being used for housing of patients; this is a National Emergency.
Barriers will slow down store resupply (already we see toilet paper, masks, hand sanitizer, rubbing alcohol, bleach, paper towels, etc. shortages) so prepare. This is coming, folks. Fast.
Work at home, etc., don’t spread any sickness, wear gloves to touch foreign surfaces or to train you to not touch your face, resolve yourself to not getting around many folks in public for the next 2-6 weeks. Treat this as a contagion because it is – if you make a mistake and are contaminated, stop the spread by sequestering yourself for the 14 days necessary to show non-infection. Even better, be the guardian for those around you and do a good job: one slip-up can infect you and then you can infect others for days before showing any symptoms.
Sanitize surfaces, wash hands like a nutcase-cum-trauma-surgeon, and figure out alternatives to your sports, hobby, academic, fraternal, professional, etc. activities and organizations. This won’t be a couple of weeks, even months. Don’t go nuts, find some new things that you can do at home or online.
We’ve got a new normal and we don’t quite see it yet – it is two weeks from now, not two weeks ago. It will come into clear focus come month’s end.
Our trip to St Augustine and Little St. Simon’s Island ended with the passage of a major cold front that led to high winds and heavy rains all along the east coast of the country. We were on a barrier island a bit away from the action, but the thunder, wind and rain did make for an interesting last night there. No major damage was noticed; barrier islands are well-suited for heavy weather. But it’s likely that some of the regular inhabitants (alligators, armadillos, birds etc.) were hunkered down!
Roseate Spoonbill, flying past Myrtle Pond, just for Betty. A few of these colorful waders spend the winter this far up the coast, but this is the only one we saw. Fortunately it was heading into a strong wind and thus flew slowly past our location.
Sanderling on the beach. These small shorebirds are ubiquitous on both the east and west coasts of North America. They scurry along the wave line, hunting for crabs or fish or detritus that might be nutritious, looking for all the world like little radio-controlled toys.
Royal Tern in flight above the beach. This is the common large tern of the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts, similar to the Elegant Tern that graces the Pacific Coast. Winter plumage means that they have this punk hairstyle; in summer the whole top of the head would be a deep black.
Bonaparte’s Gulls along the water line. This is an uncommon and unexpected bird along the Georgia coast in winter, so I was happy to find them. Small and delicate, their winter plumage has a black dot behind the eye. In summer the entire head would be black. In all plumages they show that white triangle along the outer wing, making them one of the easiest gulls on the planet to identify.
Nine-banded Armadillo rooting for its supper. Not all armadillos are nocturnal; we were told that many of the island’s armadillos appear out of their burrows about 4:15-4:30 every day and start their foraging. This one was oblivious to us, as is the case for most armadillos. This species is a relatively recent migrant to the island, and probably swam across one of the tidal rivers at low tide. They are apparently good swimmers, but have to gulp a lot of air into their intestines beforehand in order to stay afloat.
Norm, the 12-ft American Alligator who lives in Norm’s Pond on the island. We saw lots of gators, but none of them were as impressive as this beast.
Turkey Vulture and American flag.
?BillinGlendaleCA
Great pics!
p.a.
Always great work, thanks!
Geminid
Thank you for the pics. Among other places to see and photograph birds, I can recommend Huntington Beach State Park, 20 miles south of Myrtle Beach, SC; and Fort Pickens, across the bay from Pensacola, FL. Both have good tent and trailer/RV camping.
Betty Cracker
Wonderful pics, and thanks for the spoonbill!
rivers
Thanks for the advice and the beautiful pics. There’s something very calming about birds. And Norm is going to be my totem for the weeks to come – a reminder of normal life.
Albatrossity
Thanks, Alain
Somehow that image of the vulture and the flag seems oddly prescient today…
If anyone needs a daily bird picture, I post one on my twitter feed every morning. Here’s the one for today – twitter.com/DaveRintoul01/status/1238431626662641664
cope
I too love that spoonbill picture. Practically every bird picture I have ever taken is static or, at best, birds landing or taking off. Try as I might, pictures of birds on the wing continually elude me. Thanks for inspiring me to keep trying.
Kofu
With all the fuss it seems people have forgotten, it’s Springtime.
There’s no good reason to simply stay inside, and lots of good reasons to get outdoors. Just keep a safe distance from other humans, be careful about surfaces they may have touched, and enjoy the season.
Albatrossity
@Kofu: Indeed. That’s one of the great things about bird photography; it is more successful if there are not other people around. I have lots of practice at social distancing!
Betty
It’s so nice to see beautiful bird pictures and learn something about them. Thanks, as always.
WaterGirl
You image are amazing as usual, but that spoonbill picture is absolutely wonderful.
arrieve
@cope: I agree — I am in awe of how Albatrossity manages to capture birds in flight. They’re hard enough to photograph when they’re sitting still, as the hundreds of pictures of empty branches that I have taken attest — they’re speedy little buggers.
This is a treat on a gray morning, and a lovely respite from grim news. Thanks, Albatrossity.
TomatoQueen
Spoonbill! Shore birds! Norm! And…arma freakin’ dillo, yielding the obligatory:
https://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvsds1yGpJ8
karensky
Lovely photos!
eclare
That spoonbill photo is just perfection!
frosty
I’ve been trying to take pictures of birds on our annual Florida snowbird escapes with poor results. Can I ask what kind of camera and lens you’re using?
Very envious of the spoonbill. In 6 years of Februarys I haven’t even seen one, much less taken such a beautiful picture.
eachother
Thank you Alain. Great article. Positivity and pictures. You give and give. And to you my gratitude.
Albatrossity
@frosty: The actual camera equipment is probably not that important; you can take decent in-flight pics of birds with lots of different rigs these days. The secret is to take lots of pictures. In times past, in the days of film, only pros could afford the cost of taking many nearly identical shots and then choosing the very best one. Motor drives allowed you to take lots of images very quickly, but also allowed you to spend money on film and processing very quickly. I remember when I got my first motor drive, somewhere back in the Pleistocene, and I was very cautious with it, because I was not anxious to spend lots of money on film and processing, especially since most of the pics would be out of focus, in bad light, blurred by motion etc!
Nowadays many cameras have excellent fast autofocus AND the capability to shoot lots of images in rapid succession. Best of all, you can immediately discard the bad ones without paying for them to be processed! So if you have a camera that is capable of continuous autofocus, and has a “burst mode” that allows you to take several frames per second, you are ready to go find some flying birds and practice your technique. I set mine for the low-speed burst mode (8-10 images per second); the higher speed mode gives me too many images and sometimes doesn’t allow sufficient time for the autofocus to catch up with a moving bird.
frosty
@Albatrossity: Thanks! I got a Sony mirrorless 6000 for Christmas and it can do the burst thing when it’s set for shooting fast objects to eliminate blur (fast shutter speed and multiple exposures) It’s got a 16-50 mm lens. Are you using a telephoto?
Albatrossity
@frosty: Yeah, you need a lens with an effective focal length of at least 400 mm pr non-frustrating bird photography.
I’m using a Leica/Panasonic lens with a mirrorless Olympus body; the lens is nominally a 100-400 mm zoom. But on that micro 4/3 body with that small sensor, it actually is a 200-800 mm zoom. So it has a lot of reach!