COTTONTAIL

With the warmer weather we experienced this past week my wife & I took a walk by a neighboring farm one evening near sundown. As we were walking along we spied this pretty cottontail sitting under some overhanging evergreens along the roadside with low angle sunlight illuminating it perfectly. I snapped a few shots and then began moving closer, and closer, and closer until I was so close that the rabbit filled the viewfinder.

After getting the shot we walked on. Upon our return our neighbor was standing along the road and commented on the “big” camera I was carrying. Turning on the LCD I showed him what I had been shooting. With a chuckle he invited us in around the building to see where the rabbits had been feeding on tree bark while the ground was covered in deep snow.

This is a shot of what he identified as apple saplings that the rabbits had completely girdled. During periods of snow cover when cottontails cannot feed on grasses and other plants they will commonly feed on the nutritious cambium layer of woody plants while normally avoiding thick rough bark. These trees appear to have been damaged sufficiently that they will only grow from beneath the girdled area.



I hope you all like Country Captures' new look. After finding the new Blogger post editor Friday evening I began looking for a new template that would accommodate the larger picture size afforded by the post editor. After picking one and setting up a test blog to play with I happened to hop over to Abe Lincoln’s Pick a Peck of Pixels and low and behold he was posting about an all new Blogger in draft dashboard with new easily customizable templates. The new features offered there allowed me to easily give Country Capture a whole new make-over.