Mt. Pleasant Nature Photography on a Rainy Day
/This is the week I do nature photography with summer campers at Howard County Conservancy’s Mt. Pleasant and Belmont. The photography day at Mt. Pleasant was very rainy. It was the first time the weather kept us from the hiking/photo shoot. I cut some lower hanging branches from the sycamore in my yard and we used them for photography and to study the size variation…and the holes in the leaves. All three groups of campers (grouped by ages 5-12) did something with the leaves.
There were a few critters that we found on the covered porch of the nature center: a daddy-long-legs that become very interested in the pile of sycamore leaves,
A slug on a log that had come in from the floor of the nearby forest, and a house centipede that seemed to be just escaping the rain. All three critters stayed around for the 3 hours we were working.
I got some other things out from the storeroom: snake skin, antlers, skulls, honey comb, a nautilus shell, pelts from a racoon an fox.
One of the most popular items was a talon from a red shouldered hawk.
I had my clip on macro lens for campers that were using cell phone cameras. The tattered butterfly wings were popular objects for that experimentation.
The very last group was the luckiest of all because it stopped raining for a little while and we went out into the Honors garden a few steps from the porch. The campers took pictures of flowers and
An Achemon Sphinx moth that was wet and twitching on the ground near one of the flower beds – probably after being bitten by a spider.
I had a few minutes between groups and was thrilled when a couple of hummingbirds braved the sprinkles of rain and came to the feeder!
I would rather have hiked with the campers…but we managed a ‘next best’ on a rainy day in Maryland.
