Happy Monday!  I’ll admit it.  I’m a wimp anymore when it comes to travel.  I looked at my calendar this morning and the road conditions and decided I would take an unscheduled PTO day.  I knew it would take an hour or more to clean out my driveway (I did that yesterday as well) and then the slow drive to Maquoketa would add additional time on to my lateness.  I reasoned that a PTO day would be good for my mental health as well so here I sit in front of my screen working on photos.  🙂

I thought I would share some Winter photos that I took yesterday.  The image above is a tree that I have photographed in the four seasons.  I like the way it looks and yesterday morning after I finished clearing the snow the sky was a pretty blue with white wispy clouds so I was able to make this image.

Yesterday afternoon Jeanne and I drove down to the river.  It had not yet begun to snow until we arrived at the lock and dam.  There were three eagles sitting in the middle of the river by an open pool of water and two perched high up on the bluff.  I couldn’t get a decent shot of any of them so I didn’t take any.  We then drove over to the little park South of the Lock and Dam and I captured this image of a bench with the Iowa / Wisconsin bridge in the background.  It had just started to snow.  The wind was blowing pretty good as well but not as hard as it was going to a little later.

Finally we went to the 16th Street Basin.  This is a low quality image and the only reason I am showing it to you is because of what it captured.

There was a small pool of open water at the West end of the Basin and when we arrived there was a lone Mallard Duck swimming in it.  He was playing in the water and then he got out waddled over to this small opening that you see to his right, he jumped in stuck his head in the water and came out with this long thing that we first thought was a weed.  In fact I gave it no more thought until I was processing my images and I noticed that he had pulled a live fish out of the water and was trying to eat it.

I did not know that ducks ate fish.  He struggled with it for awhile but we assumed because it was the size it was he was trying to break off smaller pieces.  We didn’t stay long because it was snowing harder and watching a lone duck while interesting isn’t frankly all that interesting. 🙂

So that’s it for today.  Enjoy your day.  If you have to travel be careful and as always thanks for stopping by the blog.