Category: pets

Barclay and the bird

On By stefrobrtsIn barclay, mighty, petsLeave a comment

This morning the dogs alerted us to something exciting going on outside, and we looked out in the backyard to see Mighty slinking past the back door with a freshly caught bird in her mouth – one of those little purple swallows. Bad cat! We thought she was taking it to go eat it, but a few minutes later Barclay went trotting by with the bird in HIS mouth! Apparently the cat had brought it into the dog run, and Barclay took it.

So now Mr B was running around the house with a bird sticking out of his mouth. We conered him after a short chase, and I took him to the bathroom where we could discuss this without the other dogs involved. Dave brought in the best treat we had to offer – sandwich meat.

He held a big wad of sandwich meat in front of Barclay and said ‘Ok, Barclay, drop it and you can have this. Who wants some lunchmeat?’ and as if to say ‘I do!’ Barclay snatched the meat out of his hand – WITHOUT DROPPING THE BIRD! So now Barclay had a mouth full of lunchmeat and bird (which he was pretty happy about) Dave was standing there shocked and lucky to still have all his fingers, and I was laughing so hard I about fell over! Luckily when Dave offered him the rest of the lunchmeat, Barclay went ahead and dropped the bird so he could eat, and we snatched it away. Poor bird! But I’ll never forget Barclay snapping away that lunchmeat without giving up the prize he already had in his mouth – what a determined pup!

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Puppy-sitting!

On By stefrobrtsIn barclay, jack, navi, pets2 Comments
We have company!
Yup, Sake and Sitka are back, so we now have FOUR ESKIMOS for a couple days – poor Jack is SO outnumbered!
Well, we know he really loves it!
Time for a water break!
Oh, Barclay’s got his eye on the next target!
Run, Navi! Barclay is going to get you!
She can protect herself!
 Sake gets into it by grabbing his brother by the tail!

I love this shot of Barclay.

And this one of Sake!

Sitka couldn’t hold still for pictures, he was too busy!
And off they go again!!
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The Birds and The Bees

On By stefrobrtsIn barclay, navi, petsLeave a comment

Just having a little fun on a sunny morning, laying on my tummy in the grass taking pictures of the bees visiting the clover. Of course the dogs kept wandering by and interrupting the bees, or trying to eat them (now that would have been a great picture) or licking me on the head while I was busy looking through the camera, but it wouldn’t be the same without dogs helping, now would it 🙂

I took a LOT of shots, but none were quite what I was looking for. Bees have a tendancy to be facing the wrong way, or fly away just as you hit the shutter!

And with so many clover flowers, it’s hard to get the shot where you can make the bee stand out in the field.

This turned out to bee my favorite of the lot…

I got this shot of a rose, straight out of the camera without any messing with the colors – wow!

And our big locust tree against the cloudy sky.

And these tiny, tiny little flowers, hidden in the grass – these flowers are about a quarter inch across – so tiny!

Barclay, hanging out by the fence. They are so happy to have access to the backyard now that the blackberry vines are gone and I’m not as worried about coyotes hanging out back there, lying in wait.

Navi, digging a hole. She stuffs her face down in the hole and snorts 🙂

She’s happiest when she’s getting dirty!

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Dogs on the bed

On By stefrobrtsIn barclay, navi, pets2 Comments

This morning the dogs were hogging the bed, trying to push us off. I got fed up and said in my most stern voice ‘Enough! Both of you OFF the bed right now!’ and Navi sat up real tall, with her ears back, and gave me the most shocked look! Then she squinted and bent over for a good look at me like ‘Are you ok? You never talk like that!’ then both her and Barclay pounced on me with waggy tails and tried to lick me to death! Then they settled right back where they were in the first place! Intimidation FAIL on my part! I’ve told people that alpha-dog BS doesn’t work on Eskimos 🙂

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Kids, Llamas, Alpacas, and Dogs

On By stefrobrtsIn 4H, barclay, jack, llamas, navi, pets2 Comments
I had a fun day today, with a 4H meeting first thing in the morning. We had it at one of our 4H family’s farms, where they have alpacas. Because they recently got in a group of young alpacas they were trying to place in good 4H homes, we got to see kids working with a variety of young animals that were new to all this, which of course made for an interesting morning!
Some were resistant to this ‘jumping over stuff’ idea…
Some did not like the idea of walking on strange surfaces…
And some of them just plain didn’t want to cooperate – even though this llama in particular had years of experience!
Some kids were having much better luck with the obstacles.
Practice and persistence pays off! These kids have a show coming up, so hopefully this little refresher got their animals in the mood to cooperate next weekend!
I took my new camera to the 4H meeting, along with my longest zoom lens (200mm) because that gave me a lot of reach. I was wandering around the field where we were working, and if I saw anything interesting about to happen, I was always close enough to zoom in and get it. Another thing I like about this camera is it takes multiple pictures in quick succession without having to go into a special mode. That definitely helped me get the shot I was looking for more than once.
At home I put one of my shorter lenses (the 28-80) on for taking pictures in the yard with the dogs, because they were seldom more than an arms-length away.
I love this shot of Barclay, but because I was zoomed in, the depth of field is shallow – the result being his nose is in focus, but his eyes are soft! I’d rather have it the other way around! The best solution would have been less zoom, and move closer – but he moves around so much I had to snap it when I could – oh well! So close…
A little bone-chewing action – with the green grass and blue sky.
Then Navi took the bone. I love the way they chew on bones, they’re so concentrated like nothing else exists.
I was so glad I got this shot of Navi! She is such a goofball, but sometimes she’ll hear something and just STOP with this rediculously serious look on her face! She looks so concerned!
 Jack
 I tried to finish off with a nice portrait of Barclay and Navi sitting in the dandelions, but before I could hit the shutter Navi had to sproing away to go do something else! Well, actually, that pretty much captures their personality perfectly!
By the time I was done I’d shot about 150 pictures today. Thank God for digital cameras! This explains why I couldn’t get into photography as a kid when all we had was film!
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Dog training

On By stefrobrtsIn barclay, jack, navi, pets1 Comment

I just had a fun dog training session, with each dog individually. I started with Barclay, with my intention to teach him to roll a big ball around using his nose. Since he already knew ‘touch’ (nose to my hand), I just put my hand between him and the ball and had him touch it a few times, then removed my hand and he went right to touching the ball. I stopped then to go work on the soup for dinner, and he kept bugging me to come back for more! So I went and did another round with him, and actually had him double-touching the ball before I ran out of treats – he’ll be pushing it in no time. Then I just have to figure how I want to teach him to move it where I want him too!

Then I did a round with Navi, and worked on ‘Jump up’ like jump up on the couch, and ‘off’ – get back off the couch. And sits and downs. She is so eager to earn her treats, she goes at light speed and offers things so fast I have to click fast to catch her before she decides to offer something else.

For Jack’s turn, we did some starting nosework. I hid a treat under a towel and told him to find it, and he nosed under the towel and got the treat, and was VERY proud of himself (I think he was actually strutting around). After that seemed pretty easy I moved to putting the treat in one of three small boxes. I’d mix up the boxes and tell him to ‘find it’ and point at the boxes, and he sniffed around until he singled one out, and I opened it and let him get the treat – he got it right everytime! That’s a beagle nose for you!

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Camera lens #3

On By stefrobrtsIn barclay, dave, navi, pets2 Comments

My ‘new’ Nikon D50 camera came with three lenses. The first is a Nikkor 28-80mm F3.3-5.6 which is the basic kit lens, so it’s the one I played with first. The second one is a Tamron 18-200mm zoom lens, which I have been playing with the last couple weeks – seems like that is the lens I’ll be using most of the time. The third lens is one the previous owner bought as a spare when he left his kit lens home on a trip, and so it is quite similar to the first lens, it is a Nikon 18-55mm F3.5-5.6. So it covers a range that could be described as wide angle, to not-quite-as-telephoto as the other lenses. For that reason I hadn’t been dying to play with it. I’m not even sure I’ll keep it, but I popped it on the camera to take a few shots today.

Dave in the office working (with a cat on the printer)

It’s hard NOT to be cheerful with these smilin’ dogs in the house!
The locust trees are always the last to get their leaves back.
This is the view north over the neighbor’s dilapidated barn.
And this was one of those lovely sunsets where the sun is behind the clouds and they light up with a brilliant outline of the light behind them. Clearly I need to figure out how to adjust my exposure on this camera – not only is the detail lost in the clouds, but in the picture of the barn above it the sky is all washed out. I was spoiled by my old camera having automatic exposure bracketing. I just need to figure out how to do it manually on this one.
So my conclusion about this lens was what I was expecting. It kind of covers a range I already have covered just fine with the other two. 
Another thing I have to get used to with the new camera is that it doesn’t have a live view on the viewscreen – you have to look through the optical viewfinder. That makes it tricker to aim when you’re doing stuff close to the ground. I not only was spoiled by the view screen on my old camera, but it flipped out and rotated around so you could get shots from all sorts of interesting angles. But the quality of the pictures the new camera takes are far superior, so it’s worth the trouble to learn to just deal with the new camera!
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