Bill Kipper
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billkipper.bsky.social
Bill Kipper
@billkipper.bsky.social
2.8K followers 6.8K following 290 posts
Increasingly agitated disliker of political trends. Peacenik. Covid and environmental degradation conscious: verging on doomer. Has crow/duck/chickadee/blackbird buddies. Tardy writings available at https://billkipper.substack.com/
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billkipper.bsky.social
Wood duck youngsters basking sleepily in the morning sun despite the proximity of an alien creature, namely a red-eared slider turtle.
#nature #photography #peace #birds #turtle
#BirdOfTheDay
#DuckOutOfWater
Wood ducklings snoozing atop a slightly mossy log, against a backdrop of brilliant green reeds. A non-snoozing duckling at left has noticed the photographer, and gazes calmly in his direction. A monster from the depths shares the log with the ducklings, bright yellow stripes and red ear-patch held well away from its shell.
November 13, 2025 at 9:57 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
Semi-vaguely on topic, my wife cranks MST3K (which I call 'mistake' to trigger her) while she's crafting pine needle baskets, etc. On our nature walks, after I've chicka-dee-dee-dee'd and cawed a few too many times, I sometimes rue 'If I could STOP talking to the animals...' but, we're buds, eh?!
Crows on rustic wooden fence-posts, stretching out to upper photo right, glossy black beauties pecking sunflower seed booty.
September 17, 2025 at 11:31 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
Local pond with non-local turtle inhabitants. The Ouachita map turtle to left and Mississippi map turtle to right 'belong' in the southeastern USA, and were likely dumped after their appeal as pets wore off. Having no one to breed with = not invasive.
#nature #turtle #photography #art #reflections
Rippled green pond surrounding the flat top of a stump, which is populated by a diminutive Ouachita map turtle at left, and several times larger Mississippi map turtle dominating the stump to the right.
September 15, 2025 at 1:04 AM
billkipper.bsky.social
A tree swallow fledgling awaiting its BeakDash® breakfast delivery, and receiving the goods from the 'driver'. The landing/feeding took less than a second, so I was mighty happy to capture that moment.
#birds #nest #insects #photography #emotions #nature #luck #beauty #SurreyParks
Seen from behind and left, a grey and white tree sparrow youngling with brilliant yellow beak sits atop a lichen-encrusted wooden nest-box, looking glumly at the photographer, who is clearly a waste of breath with respect to supplying tasty insects. A white-bellied tree swallow clings to the top edge of the nest-box, stuffing an unseen insect into the fledgling's mouth in a high-tempo docking maneuver.
September 13, 2025 at 1:28 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
Those 'are' the gills. Caps look like this, and are surprisingly small.
thumb on bark next to typical splitgill mushrooms, which are poorly described as 'large'.
April 1, 2025 at 9:02 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
Nice. I have some miniature relatives nearby, trametes hirsuta, who have cunningly grown through some graphis scripta to splendid visual effect.

#mushlove #fungus #lichen #fuzzy #nature #beauty #aliens
Hairy turkey-tail imitators sprouting through 'common' script lichen View of polypore shrooms undersides, showing their multitude of small pores, with a sprig of moss at image bottom
February 22, 2025 at 6:24 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
It's a bit less funny when you consider the US military bases around Europe, and probable SecDef being an alcoholic Armageddon-embracing fool. It's double-plus unfunny watching idiot-led American fascism unfold from Canada.
#fascism #europe #USmilitary #NineteenEightyFour #orwellian #hegseth
Map of Europe and north Africa with countries hosting US military bases coloured red. Black-bordered grey circles 'might' be 'facilities'.
January 24, 2025 at 4:40 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
"...and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government."

Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City.
#MLK #war #tyranny
Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence (excerpts) I'm convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered. It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.
January 19, 2025 at 10:24 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
1) Surely these jellies taste like Tang, the cleverly marketed beverage of the US manned space program!
2) Mountaineers of the Tilted Darkling Plain
3) Pyxidata radar dishes beaming their coordinates to the Motherlich above...
4) Lichens who voted for peaceful coexistence
#lichen #peace #natural
A row of slime-jellies getting some sun on a substrate of lichen crusted fence plank, with poorly focused same lower in the frame, and total blurrosity below of mysterious greens and Samsung-fabricated bokeh. The most perfect of our orange gumdrops has a photo-bombing purple critter atop, catching the rays before heading over to our second image... Your basic science-fiction landscape, only tiny, and on Earth. A triangle of lichen-annoyed wood trends down from roughly 1/3rd height left to bottom right, supporting a pale green foliose lichen on the first rank of blackened wood-grain above. To image right from said lichen, the first of the 'cute' lichen bunny globular springtails is traversing a woody terrace in search of a rottener way of life. Slightly left, a pair of inscrutably tiny purple springers are nibble-browsing their way up a minor fault. Following the trend of the grain left, we arrive at a minor sunburst lichen, above and right of which we hit the last of the lichen trio, another foliacal blip, where the real horror(fun) begins. A trio of globulars seem to be navigating the dark topo-map ridges to gain the upper slopes, where another quartet are making their way up to the summit of Mount Fence-Post. Our heroic trio below need to avoid a sinuous crevasse, not least because a pair of purples lurk on the nearby crevasse wall, ready to spring a surprise. Thriving Cladonia pyxidata thicket of trumpety cups rising from their typical lettucy undergrowth, roughly image centre, with dark and decaying wet wood above, a minor infestation of trumpets to left, chasm to right, and recognizably woody grain below, which is slightly besmirched by a couple of slime molds and dotted with cladonial daughters. Wall of Profusion, featuring a steeply-banked left-upward trending wooden slope of moderately unfocused wood and lichens pointing to the primary subject: an upright wall of cladonia and pals exploiting the gap behind a detached wood flake, and other details described below. The tallest trumpet just touches the weird, white-puckered rib that leads into leafy lichen above, and left of Puckerville one finds a classic maritime sunburst cup-set and pale blue-green leafy lichen.
January 13, 2025 at 10:25 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
Lichens enlivening pits of deadwood despair. So much beauty in such tiny homes. Still can't believe I walked past these things for years without pausing to look closely.
THEY LIVE AMONGST US!!!
#nature #art #lichen #miniatures #roswell #justkidding #aliens #unseen #breathe #fungus #algae
Cladonia-bro and pals sprouting inside a lumberous eye, with bro the mostest emerging from the wee-est sprig of mossy bedness. The upper eyeball is dominated by a single stunted pyxidata 'bloom' that looms out of the darkness. You fit into me like a hook into an eye: a cladonia hook; a wooden eye. Seems appropriate as the whackjobs push Atwood's novel into a disturbed, enworsened Handmaid's Tale. Hooky cladonia lashes rise from the bottom of a knothole eye, curving down and left, framed against lumpy black rot above Imagine Jupiter's great red spot, wooden cloud streamers splitting around it, only the spot is black, and a pit, with a few tiny lichens establishing a toehold within. One day, this pit will be a great green spot, if we don't Venusify our gorgeous globe first. Another wooden eye, with a few trumpettes des cladonias popping from the pupil, teeny patch of maritime sunburst below them, a minuscule oakmoss antler below that, and a rim dominated by some foliose lichens. A few strands of mist-dotted spider silk tie the scene together
January 11, 2025 at 9:01 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
Great shot! Those grow across the street from me but I've failed to get a good image cuz they're so tiny.

This lepiota is more my size, with the May Ho (chuckle) CD I found nearby for scale:
Large mushroom cap seen from above, with hints of lobes, mostly cream with brown speckles increasing toward the center. A CD lies in the grass above and right, featuring a 'come hither' looking photo of an Asian woman who's apparently (unfortunately?) named May Ho. The shroom dwarfs the CD.
January 9, 2025 at 4:52 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
The black heart of American culture has been beating strong since the first Thanksgiving (and then some). Your doomer instinct is tracking reality.
Frankly, I'd wager 100 million Americans would have slavery back IN A HEARTBEAT. They would, of course, expand it to fit in those other 'undesirables'.
Why America didn’t take action Burns, whose previous historical documentaries include “The Roosevelts” (2014) and “The Vietnam War” (2017), says the message on a neon sign hanging in his office—“It’s complicated”—is an apt summary of the issues discussed in “The U.S. and the Holocaust.” Over three two-hour segments, the film dispels competing myths that Americans were either ignorant of the persecution of Europe’s Jews or knew about it but responded with callousness and indifference. (The reality was somewhere between these two extremes; newspapers kept the American public informed about the Holocaust, sparking limited but concerted aid efforts by numerous organizations and individuals.) It also convincingly shatters the myth of America as the ever-welcoming champion of the oppressed. “Americans have a very hard time deciding what kind of country they want to have,” says Peter Hayes, a historian at Northwestern University who appears in the documentary. “We all tend to think of this country and the Statue of Liberty [poem] ‘Give me your tired, your poor.’ … But in fact, exclusion of people and shutting them out has been as American as apple pie.”
January 8, 2025 at 10:08 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
Well, this ice fog is getting me down, so while my puffed up junco buddies nibble finch food out of the frosty lawn, howzabout a reminder or two of summer?

#summer #winter #blah #flowers #dahlia #bee #pollinator #resist #frigid #PolarVortex #sighBeerian #CoffeeFilledBoots
Bumblebee making a right old polleny mess of a defenseless and pinwheeled Dahlia, an otherwise lovely Verrone's Obsidian. Gorgeous deep purple velvety petaled dahlia with a brilliant yellow center, and no bee. The 7 o'clock petal partially conceals an unknown self-locomoting life-form. Background is lush green garden foliage.
January 7, 2025 at 4:41 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
Last birding shots of 2024, featuring odder ducks than usual, being carnivorous divers with nasty pointy beaks, namely common and hooded mergansers, who I'm always thrilled to see return to our humble pond park each winter.
#birds #newyears #aquatic #nature #willdiveforfood #StayPuft
Common Merganser, cruising through the pond, to Hooded Merganser on collision course: bruh! what's with the marshmallow in yer head! Hooded: head envy's a bad look, and oh SNAP! who's 'common', again?! Meanwhile, back in photo composition land, a stalk poking from the water points at hooded bro, and with its reflection frames common dude, who is also pointed out by an off-kilter curved blade. Otherwise still waters disturbed by passage of wild-ass aquatic birds. Swimming to image left, a Hooded Merganser female at bottom left, male version at top, common merganser between them but slightly back, with a second common entering the frame at right. Flotilla. Armada. Etc.
January 1, 2025 at 3:46 AM
billkipper.bsky.social
Thanks, Hendrik! For several years I've walked around this park, watching the birds and changing flora through the seasons, and never thought to examine what was obviously a filthy, slimy fence. 🙄
Mind you, it was easy to overlook the tiny things when nature was also supplying 'this':
December 31, 2024 at 7:31 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
Helvella Vespertina, which associates with conifers, arborvitae in this case. Found this flush after learning to look for weird black lumps that aren't cones or dung, combined with my typical doggedness.
Truly the fairy circle from hell, this lot.
#fungus #mushrooms #beauty #nature #presence #hell
Huge screef in a suburban lawn, with an off-kilter pruning victim identifying as a white cedar, or arborvitae if you prefer, in the center of the raised hump. Black lumps surround said uber-screef, moving in for the kill! but not really, as they're a symbiotic pair (or more!) in a mycorrhizal love-fest of horny hyphae. Closer view of the insidious black peril moving in for the kill through the moss-tortured lawn, which is held at bay by heartless humans called 'gardeners' or 'lawn-care specialists' etc, who've hacked out a circle around our besieged cedar. The monolith monster is revealed! A horrifying, rain-moistened black glob of doom suspended on a dismayingly gnarly stem has glorped its way out of a mossy substrate, showing our sensibilities absolutely no mercy. I captured one of the monsters, and present it here for your grisly fascination. Mounted on a humiliating toilet paper blotter, the velvety black (none more black!) beret encloses the death-pallored and far too ornate stem/stalk/stipe/pedestal of horror.
December 29, 2024 at 11:10 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
Learned about these uglies courtesy of Aaron Hilliard's foraging walks with his canine companion Gunnar in the PNW on YouTube.
Edible, maybe, but the lack of enthusiasm suggests they taste like they look, which is cool yet ugh.
Go ALT for info.
www.youtube.com/@mushroomwon...
#fungus #mushroom
Helvella dryophila is a species of fungus in the family Helvellaceae. It is found in western North America, where it associates with oak. - Wikipedia Warped black parasol on a fluted grey/ivory stem (stipe, to please myco-fascists, and just kidding, cuz love me some mycological correctness), growing out of a mossy bed in close proximity to a log of filthy retaining wall wood. Helvella cap of lumpy black oddness (surprisingly high albedo, as shown by relative brightness) is now dead-centre, supported by its peculiar I-beam-like grey stipe, with near-field amber oak leaf and oh so dirty wood dominating the right half of frame. Moss keeps lawn at bay to image left, as it should. Trio presentation of Helvella, small one poking out from behind blades of grass, several times larger big-daddy shroom looming above it and some moss, with a mid-size 4-seater shroom just left and amidships of Hella McVelladaddy. Lower image left features a capless stalk, showing the characteristic hollow nature of this species' lower portion. Stipe of Daddio is unusually white, but has expressed no anti-cap sentiments. Dog-stomped Helvella duo, upper one clearly snapped from its base as evidenced by the fluted 'stem to nowhere', lower truffly-looking unit bearing battle scars and possibly separated from the stipe remnants crying out for justice to its immediate left. All lawn here, with type-evidence oak leaf at image top, and a partial midway up image right.
December 29, 2024 at 10:18 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
Merry Lichensmas, everybody! Lichen bunnies for one and all in this photo set. Perpetual twilight here in SW BC can be defeated by gazing at the brilliant colours of our local encrustations. Samsung S21 'camera'. ALT for info, fo fo...

#lichen #algae #luminous #art #photo #fun #zoom #iykyk #therapy
Springtail nosh pit. A crooked row of wee beasties, with my first dicyrtoma fusca bringing up the rear. Poised above lichen stained wet blurry wood, our springtails are navigating dark brown battered bark on a small branch from the southwest of image to northeast. Above them, we see our lobed sunburst with but a few cups, a clump of drenched moss above and within that, and a hint of pale green foliose lichen to close the scene. Physcia Leptalea are the butter tart cups with greenish rims in centre, maritime sunburst of lemon yellow and sliced limes dominates the lower and left third, with 'settling ponds' whiter-rimmed Lecanora trailing off into blur towards top right. Assorted globular springtails as usual, outside focal range. A pair of globulars nibble organics away from each across a surreal landscape of white-rimmed gray cups and assorted nondescript lichen patches, with a peculiar tentacle wall of green suction cups behind. Scary, spiky little foliose lichen punk standing up out of a sea of yellow cups, silhouetted against murky lumber and a distant lichened branch. One wonders if the spikes allow survival amidst the dominant and possibly suffocating lichen.
December 25, 2024 at 5:21 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
Ponderosa pine cones, junior edition. Couple of inches/50mm long, appr.
#hiddenbeauty #photography #trees #green #cone #noshame #nature #lit #life
A pair of young ponderosa pine cones on the branch, like spiky purple pineapples sans their green tops. One is aimed right at us, seemingly, the one above is pointing up and right. Paired green needles extend up and out from the central stalk, still bearing their brown cellophane wraps near the stalk. Most of the needles extend out of frame.
December 20, 2024 at 5:17 AM
billkipper.bsky.social
A mallard couple legitimized my presence for the common mergansers, who remained near the shore, allowing for a half-decent photo for once. Gratuitous miniature resulted from looking down: gotta love a lichen.
Ducks were rewarded for their service.
#ducks #mergansers #friends #birds #wet #lichen
Mallard hen looking elsewhere while her iridescent drake buddy pretends to not be looking at me. Mossy with evidence of lupines, tall rank grass above and beyond. A pair of male Common Mergansers glide left through the drab brown rippled overcast reflecting waters. Tall green grass at bottom right, cattails to bottom left, small dripping branches indicate from the right where to look for birds. Waterlogged cedar stump cut off by photo top on the left, with another to the right. Orange pulp slime mold lumps interspersed with tiny shield lichens and unknown licheny yellow green oblongs. The wood-grain trends up and right and is drenched, partially submerging the life-forms.
December 19, 2024 at 10:48 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
Perfect light for the limited range of the S21, freshly watered lichens and moss, and a highly enjoyable stroll and workout.
#lichen #moss #phoneCamera #macro #photography #magical #esthetic #SlowDown #lightenup #threemiles #5km #revealed #nature #umbrella #resist
Brilliant and bizarre yellow-green cups of sunburst lichen, hundreds of them, from tiny to perhaps 1/10th screen width. Shallow imperfect cups, greener at the margins. Vignetted courtesy of poor depth of field. A wet black void in the lower quarter for contrast. Wet debarked dark wood above, one follows the sheen down to a stunning pair: sunburst cups to the left, young green moss shoots to the right. The moss leaves the confines of the lumber, projecting up and right and obscuring a patch of the weather-mottled bokeh-board behind. Green vegetal horns with shallow cups have erupted from the surface of some haggard fence beam near where it joins a post. Roughly hewn to where it looks more split than sawn, this crudely beautiful host of the cladonia forest. Upper left quadrant is distant, out of focus leaves. A hump of light green moss sports slender green rods culminating in luminous green reproductive escape pods. A few cladonia towers lurk where focus is marginal at the right, partially hidden by moss. Below and left, a wedge of mini-cladonia have partially reddened and have a splendid adult with small turrets lording above them. Wet dark wood blurrily fills much of the background, with a second set of mostly cladonia back-stopping the escape pods in a similarly soft focus.
December 19, 2024 at 10:10 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
Pretty little mycenas for you, Luke.
Moss-heavy grass becoming fallen brown maple leaves with mycena mushrooms clustered primarily in the center to left region. The upper quarter is all leaf. The mushrooms are on the nipply side, pale brown fading to ivory towards the cap margins, with radial striations of the central brown colour pulling the eye down to more modest places.
December 19, 2024 at 2:21 AM
billkipper.bsky.social
Mr Crowbuddy has probably eaten 10,000 sunflower seeds supplied by his soft-beaked pal, so he's celebrating with a hop, skip, and a chomp.
Weathered grey fence plank with a crow caught in mid-air mid-prance a few inches above, assorted chaotic tree foliage behind him, above him mixed blue sky and cloud.
December 17, 2024 at 9:25 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
Ducky-Duck and the kids having a nosh. She's known me for at least a year, and knew that the kids would be safe with me. If she detects danger, she emits one loud QUACK and they turn tail and hurry out to the pond in single file. Unsurprisingly, she's adept at putting her ducklings in a row. #birds
December 17, 2024 at 6:44 PM
billkipper.bsky.social
A well-executed cliche. Still, it's amazing this came out of a phone.
As seen at Semiahmoo Spit this summer.

#Black&White
#photo
#boat
#blather
#b&w
#EscapeFromReality
#time
#art
#balance
Grayscale image of scraggly grass leading up to an old fishing boat that's been stripped of seaworthiness by weather and time, lying left broadside with a view into its battered interior. Planks are popping off the visible side. Above and right stands a plain wooden industrial-looking building whose planks are vertically oriented and shaded, making a textural and tonal contrast that pleased my eye. The sky above is streaked with cirrus 'flames', which one could interpret as the boat's spirit evaporating. The roof line of the building is bolstered by a streak of those same clouds. In the distance beyond a glimpsed sea are hilly suburbs.
December 16, 2024 at 6:06 PM