Good morning!
Trackside Vol. 181, “Animals and Trains,” is ready for your votes and thoughts! What do you think?
Have a nice week!
I expected cows and dogs, maybe a cat…but these surprised me, happily enough. Yeah, the snake is the most off the wall idea. And I am sure emu’s are as common next to steam in South Africa as EMU’s in England. But, the luckiest catch has to be the deer with their gear off the ground; just wish the locomotive gear could have been seen. But again the reader gets the nod.
My vote goes to Tom Nano’s photo. Pretty setting, colors and of course, the required {animals}…in this case, the geese.
Sorry, Kent…I hate snakes…!
And the approaching running deer were, surely different…but I liked the first photo better. Hope you {James}, jumped out of the way in time.
I had a tough time deciding between the reader’s (James) photo and Tom’s.
James’s shot was certainly interesting and quite the catch. The deer along with the little steamer was a nice photo, but it had little color or contrast. But what it lacked in ‘punch’ it made up for in subject matter (and rarity).
Tom’s photo was composed, colorful, and all in focus; which is, of course, much easier to do if you can set up the shot and wait for the train…much harder to do when a deer jumps out of the brush and runs right towards you. However, the rubbish in the water really turned me off.
James by a (deer) whisker.
Actually, that “rubbish” is a makeshift boat mooring made from an empty beer keg and a couple boat fenders. They just happened to have the boat out that morning.
Tom Lanos photo I liked for the water and the reflection of the engines. Kind of neat.
Thx IGN
Toss up between Drew and James.
Went with Drew’s coyote because we have a family of them living in our yard also, along with a pair of Red Tailed Hawks.
The hawks have been there years, the coyotes keep repopulating every year, at least one or the other of their offspring has been there all the time I have been.
And the black and white format just added to the whole feel of the photo.
The coyote shot caught my eye, and would have been my choice were it not for the deer - a shot I’ve been on the other side of (in the cab) several times.
Could someone pass this on to Kent … when the Galesburg Yard was entirely rebuilt in the early 1980s, the BN brought in large amounts of fill that they dug up from their properties along the Mississippi River. Included in that dirt were some hibernating rattlesnakes. For the first time ever in spring Galesburg had rattlers and the locals were not the least bit happy with the railroad. Eventually you no longer heard about them and perhaps there were just too few to form breeding pairs. But while i suspect any snake you see in Galesburg these days is probably a harmless and beneficial reptile, in the back of my mind at least I’d be thinking … it could be … best to avoid.
I would also say, animal wise, that Galesburg in the vicinity of where Kent made that shot has some of the most wonderful fireflies I have ever seen, anywhere.
Dave Nelson
Tossed up between Drew & James. The deer in full flight won out. But I did like the coyote resting in the grass. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to see that James is running away with this one. Next (were at time of making this comment) Tom (12.74) and Drew (12.19).