Digiscoped from 120 feet above sea level, north of Yaquina Head, Newport, Oregon, on 17 February 2010 at 5:47pm. Sony 8.1 megapixel Cyper-shot and Nikon Fieldscope 50-A.
Sunset at Agate Beach, Newport, Oregon, from 120 feet above sea level, 2 July 2009. Several green flashes can be seen forming and dissolving. Sorry about the wiggling--we're working on how to eliminate that.
Nika the Shiba and Kenai the husky are best friends, but they spent a great deal of time roughhousing when they were younger. Kenai is about a year older than Nika.
3 September 2006 in Newport, Oregon, at 130 feet above sea level. It was digiscoped with a little Sony point-and-shoot and a Swarovski AT-80 scope at 20x, with the Sony at full zoom.
Shibas don't howl--that's what we were told. Nika was "raised" by a Siberian Husky female and Kenai howls all the time. We often have group howls--dogs and their humans--be glad we didn't post that spectacle! BirderBob learned how to howl from Nika and Kenai--his mother never taught him that.
Here's Nika at four years old trying to break his third Uh-Oh Toy. He has utterly destroyed two of these mechanical mice by pulling off their plastic tails as he slings them around, trying to kill them. We encourage this behavior--last fall he killed two Roof Rats that were living in our house in the same manner. At least the Uh-oh Toy doesn't spray blood all over the kitchen when it "dies"!
This is Nika's first experience with the mechanical mouse. It didn't take him long to learn that he could grab it by the tail, sling it around, chew off the tail, and make us buy another Uh-Oh Toy. That's an Invisible Fence collar he's wearing. We never had to leash him around home and after the first time he was careful not to get shocked by straying over the "fence".
