Fall foliage at Kernsville Dam provides a beautiful setting for this man fishing from a canoe. Last Thursday was a near perfect autumn day - sunny, afternoon high in the low 60s, and the trees nearing the peak of their colorful display. Left-click on the photo for a full-screen view and note the stone structures on the far shore. These are remnants of the former Schuylkill River Canal that provided a means of transportation for millions of tons of coal, as well as other commodities, between Port Carbon and Philadelphia over nearly a century of operation.

  Common Merganser - Mergus merganser - females - in the Schuylkill River below the Kernsville Dam. None of the photos of these megansers is really first rate, but this is the only time I have ever seen any.

 

Great Blue Heron with a pair of Wood Ducks.

  Wheel Bug - Arilus cristatus - only the second one I've seen, the first I showed here last September. This one landed on that leaf right in front of me while I was shooting the Great Blue Heron at the far end of the pond which you see in the photo above.

  Common Checkered Skipper - Pyrgus communis - rather late in the year to see these still flying.

 

Spider Web - no tricks, just good luck got this shot. I leave to the arachnid specialists the determination of which sort of Orb Weaver is the maker of this trap. All I know is that it is particularly colorful as you can see in the lower center part of the photo.

 

  Sulphur - Colias "albino" - female - in this "summer" form, lacking any yellow or orange coloration, it is extremely difficult (some authorities say impossible) to distinguish between the females of Orange Sulphur and Clouded Sulphur.

 

  Orange Sulphur - Colias eurytheme - female - in normal coloring, but a bit washed-out due to the strong back-lighting.

  Moon - about three-quarters full - handheld with the camera braced against the open window of my van. The new Sony Alpha 700 did a great job in its automatic mode, aided by having a fairly bright early evening sky surrounding the moon. This shot was made with a 75-300 zoom lens mounted on a 1.5x teleconverter.

 

Whitetail Deer - Odocoileus virginianus - taking flight. While stalking butterflies on the edge of a farm field, I startled two deer resting in a thicket. No time to properly frame a shot - Whitetails can hit 35 miles per hour in a pinch - I just snapped the shutter. This shot isn't very good, but the next one only shows a tail.

  Common Buckeye - Junonia coenia - a good top view; for the underside, scroll down to the 12 September photos.

  Orange Sulphur - Colias eurytheme - female. This season I have seen a number of these that are rather ambiguously marked, not as white as the textbook summer form females of Orange and Clouded Sulphurs.

  Night highway work - rather colorful, but I never did find out what they were doing with my tax money.

 

  Clouded Sulphur - Colias philodice - male; here, at the end of the season during our Indian Summer, these, the Orange Sulphurs and the Cabbage Whites continue in abundance. Very few other species remain, however, and those in much smaller numbers: Common Buckeye, Pearl Crescent and Monarch, plus a few skippers. I wonder, are we still allowed to say Indian Summer, or is that no longer politically correct? Perhaps the name was changed while I wasn't looking. Should it be Native American Warming?

 
Who needs professional wrestling when you can watch kittens wrestling in the yard? And, these pint-sized combatants are better actors; they work without a script, it's all improv.