That’s just how it is! We don’t feed them or anything.
I’ve certainly had moments of “Wow, that’s a very tall dog over there”.
I was on a trip tofsy to a wildlife refuge in southeast Missouri. My sister, cousin, and her husband were all together. We saw at least ten thousand snow geese and a huge amount of swans, along with a number of other water fowl. But the best was all the eagles, at least a hundred. I have never seen more than three eagles together at once.
That’s awesome! I’d have liked to see the swans.
I went to a funeral today, and when we came out of the church, this was in the sky! Is that cool or what? I’m not a believer, but it did seem awfully symbolic of something or other.
I can’t begin to figure out what that is (!). Is the bright spot the sun behind cloud, or is the arc around the sun (with sun out of shot, obviously)?
j
I’ve seen lines through the Sun like that, but usually there’s also a vertical one to go with the horizontal. Though the bright spot could also be a sun dog, rather than the Sun itself, with the Sun itself a bit off to the left or right.
Could the bright line be a straight line in reality? Look at how the prolongation of the tree trunks hit the line perpendicularly: a wide angle would explain this. And at a certain point this trail reflects the sun behind the camera. The trees seem to be illuminated from behind the camera too, though I am not sure of that.
It was a curved line in the sky, though I’m not sure it was a whole circle. And I don’t know if the bright spot is the real sun or a reflection. I think the sunlight was coming from behind me. I see stuff online about ice crystals, but it was like 70 degrees outside! 
It doesn’t have to be cold at the ground to have ice crystals at the height in the atmosphere where these effects occur.
Oh, and if there’s anyone around here who would know the full explanation, it’d be @CalMeacham .
You rang?
What the picture shows is an ice crystal phenomenon called the Parhelic Circle. It’s caused by sunlight reflecting from ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere all lined up the same way because of atmospheric drag. You can tell that it’s due to sunlight reflection from the faces of crystals, rather than due to light passing through the crystals and refracting, because there’s no color separation. The Parhelic circle can be a full 360 degree circle going around the sky at the altitude of the sun, or it might be only a part of the circle – it all depends on whether there are ice crystals in those parts of the sky to reflect the sunlight.
Those of you who said that they saw this in association with other ice crystal phenomena are quite correct – you’ll often get other things as well, such as the vertical Sun Pillar that also passes through the sun, the 23 degreee halo due to light refracting through ice crystals, the Sundogs at 23 degrees (which separate from the 23 degree halo as the sun rises), and others. But you can also get a parhelic circle all by itself.
Awesome. Thank you so much!
That is a very cool website too!
Today I heard woodpeckers drumming - barely a week after the solstice, Man, that’s early for the UK. Late winter/early spring is the norm.
j
My wife and I finally took the DSNG train for a little ride. We have never been able to do the full trip to Silverton, because it’s a nine hour trip, and we don’t want to leave to dog alone for that length of time. In the winter, they do a shorter trip to Cascade canyon, so we did that. i was really hoping for snow, but now such luck. Still, it was a fun trip.
I had to go out and get some gas this morning, but before I melted the frost on the windshield, I had to admire the beautiful patterns it made:
That’s still beautiful! What is DSNG?
Also really cool! I’d pay for an art display of that.
Well, darn. I thought this thread was going to be about Nature, the prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal. I was hoping for an article about dark matter or something.
The Durango-Silverton Narrow Gauge railroad.
Once a mining train, now a tourist train, although they still bring supplies to Silverton when the road is cut off by snow.
Train: