Photo: Rare Corvallis Caracara

Here's a rough photo of the rare Crested Caracara bird that has shown up outside Corvallis, taken late yesterday. Apparently they usually never go farther north than Texas. We watched it from a distance as it edged closer to a red-tailed hawk that had some delicious meaty morsel. I snapped this blurry shot while driving past, but couldn't stop - we would have been bludgeoned to death with spotting scopes had it been scared away. More details on this phenomenon in the Gazette Times.

Photos: Banana Slugs Are Out

I took an early morning walk through Finley the other day. The banana slugs seemed to be everywhere. Here's a few photos of these magnificent creatures. (ugh!) The blue version has been heavily modified, it's the same slug as the other image. Also, the pond near the woodpecker trail loop is infested with frisky newts. Luckly I was photographing in RAW, otherwise that last image would have ended up in the trash bin - RAW (like an undeveloped digital negative) allows you to push the colors in an image farther than you can with JPEG or TIFF.