Man, that is one handsome butterfly!
j
Here he is- my wife got a photo:
Thanks! Apparently it’s Florida’s state butterfly.
Colorado is so beautiful. One of the best places I’ve ever seen.
Yes, it is.
Here’s my Nature Photo from today:
Talk about a good place to lookout from!
Lovely.
I really enjoy nice landscape shots, but I’ve noticed I just don’t have a great eye for them myself. What looks good(ish) in the viewfinder never seems to translate to the final image as well as I’d like.
I take a LOT of images so that I can find one that I am happy with. What I’ve noticed is: landscapes that look amazing when viewed from the car often only look so-so on film (digital). I was thinking about this today, and I believe there are at least two things at play: the cropping of the windshield, and the tint and brightness reduction of the glass.
Glad you found him. We’ve had a few instances of this and found out about it too late 
This guy has been trying to poach the frogs out of our pond.
Today in nature I saw…
A really cool lightning storm.
Again, fantastic shot 
.
Nice shot. Luck or planning?
Fabulous. Re the luck vs planning thing, I’m guessing that to a certain extent you made your own luck?
j
Planning, in that I had my camera and tripod. Lucky that I saw the lightning when I went to walk the dogs, and that we happen to be staying at an AirBnB that is on a bluff, overlooking the Animas valley.
Literally and figuratively stunning. 
A few hours before, we were walking to dinner in Historic Durango. It was raining, but what was freaking my wife out was the thunder - it was cracking and booming every few seconds, and it was loud.
The storm must have moved off to the west, because when we finished dinner, it had stopped raining and the sun was out:
ETA: I love the weather up here - so much variety!
Our neighborhood Cooper’s hawk swooped low over my windshield as I was turning onto my street this afternoon. He was chasing a pigeon, but he didn’t seem all that serious about it, and he was finally close enough in flight that I can identify him as a Cooper’s and not a sharp-shinned hawk (there was some controversy)!
I saw a barred owl this morning on a branch right over my head! He was being harassed by a couple of blue jays. He stared at us for a moment, then decided to move on.
There are some exceptions to that rule, like the vampire bat and the lesser short-tailed bat in New Zealand.