Hi. I've been here and enjoying this site for a few months now. Have read many conversations daily and have participated in a few conversations, gotten to know a few folks a bit, and have looked at many many many pictures posted here. I have already learned so very much and have enjoyed so very much here.

I felt it was long overdue for me to sign in and tell folks a little about me. I rarely stay on sites this long even ... but I think I'll be hanging around on this site for quite some time. Maybe it's that we're all into Cameras. But there are a lot of sites like that. I think it has to do with the witty, friendly, sharing and giving, open-for-criticism-and-guidance, twinkle-eyed, kindly cantankerous folks here.

People call me Shaker. It is a long story.

The last item on my bucket list was a really good camera and then to use it to create something that felt like a whisper from God.

I've seen some pictures like that here.

So ... as I sold my farm this Summer (closed a few weeks ago) I began to fulfill that last item. You might say I have lived my life 'breaking bread' while fulfilling my bucket list items. But even though this item was added to my list when I was sixteen ... 53 years ago ... I am only just now finally getting to it.

One early autumn morning when I was sixteen, I was out on the Plum Island Sound Marshes huddled in the tall grass between my canoe and my goose decoys. I loved the geese, so I knew how to talk with them, and I had called in a large chevron of Canadian geese ... called them in from the dunes a half mile away ... and they circled down the sound about a mile, across to the woods inland, then circled back and straight to me ... their bellies tickling the top of the marsh grass. And when they got about one hundred yards in front of me, about twenty hunters popped up out of the grass and blasted them. They missed totally. Wounded one that flew about a mile down the sound and collapsed. And not one of them went to look for it. Those men had crept in in front of the 'kid who could call', instead of hunting on their own.

I laid my hunting gun down forever that morning. Went down marsh to look for the wounded goose. But I had a love-affair with the geese and the marsh grass and all the other beings (which i why I could call them or stalk them better than many). So I promised myself that day that some day I would get a good camera and return.

Well ... so it too me fifty-three years (I'm sixty nine now). But here I am. Out almost every morning early and in love. This morning I had an early breakfast with some spiders in a sun-dewed web, a few warblers, a thrush, some fog on the field, a whole splash of doves and a young eagle who came right down in front of me and shared her mealtime while she kept looking at me as if to say "well, it took you long enough to get here! Now are you gonna take some pictures...? or are you gonna just stand there gawking...?"

I haven't yet, but I think it is time that I post some pictures I've taken this past month, so people can get a chuckle over how a newbie can ruin a perfectly good shot on a perfectly good camera.

And I thank everyone here for being here and for making this site the nicest ugliest hedgehog I've ever seen!!!