One of the primary and oft-noted joys of my so-called retirement has been the opportunity, camera and field equipment in hand, to get out into the natural world every day and bring back a raft of observations. This horde of riches—well, personal riches... I haven't, so far, gotten rich, beyond metaphorically, doing this—has led to the blog, and, most days, I have a large number of photographs to choose from in my search to highlight one or, more rarely, two, to write about. Today, however, more deadlines called. But, when I poked my head outside around lunchtime, so did at least one very noisy Pileated Woodpecker, and since I did have a few minutes between writing assignments, I put the Sigma supertelephoto on the camera and headed off in the direction of the sound. Not surprisingly, the Pileated got spooked and by the time I got to the Noah-sized Stream behind the house, the great bird had gone silent and disappeared into the woods. The stream, however, was anything but quiet and called, "Take my picture." The big lens is not exactly conducive to this kind of photography and, with the light fairly low and no tripod at hand, I wasn't sure I could capture anything sharp. But I made the one image—just one for the entire day—that I took a good one... and a record of the recent rains and the ongoing January Thaw.