While surfing – do people still do that these days? – around the net last night, I couldn’t help but come across the post that many people shared.
Spectacular images of a snowy owl in flight have been captured by Transport Quebec’s traffic camera along Montreal’s Highway 40.
The images were captured on Jan. 3 by a traffic camera at Highway 40 and Sources Boulevard.
Transport Minister Robert Poëti tweeted about the owl early Thursday morning, and the province later released video footage.
According to Barbara Frei, the director of the McGill Bird Observatory, this young female was probably looking for a place to perch.
“I think they are attracted specifically to the highway because it has open, grassy fields nearby which is perfect for hunting their favourite prey, which is small rodents,” she said.
“They like to get a good lay of the land and the high lamp posts or other posts that they can perch on while hunting just suits them perfectly.”
Frei says snowy owls breed north of the Arctic Circle, where they hunt in the summer.
“They’ll migrate to their ‘winter vacation,’ which can be all the way down to southern Canada, in the Montreal region or places in Ontario.”
That got me thinking about accidents, since the above photo is wonderfully framed and, well, simply stunning yet completely unintentional.
I did a little research and found a couple of other good accidental photo news stories.
The first stems from an awful event. I’ve had a phone stolen – albeit many years ago now and well before an iPhone. It is not a nice experience. However, the relatively recent addition of iCloud which automatically backs up photos was a good thing for this person who suffered that very fate.
Having your iPhone stolen can be a nightmare. There’s the invasion of privacy, potentially losing all your contacts, the feeling you’ve lost touch with the world, not to mention the sheer expense of buying a new phone.
But what if there was a way to remotely look through your phone’s camera and see the thief in action?
That’s exactly what happened to Katy McCaffrey who, according to her Facebook account, had her iPhone stolen back in April while aboard a ship operated by Disney Wonder Cruise Lines.
Now, a man who appears to be a Disney employee named Nelson has been taking photos with her phone, all of which soon began automatically uploading to her Apple iCloud Photo Stream account.
McCaffrey has since gotten some sweet revenge by making 20 of those photos –with commentary to match — available to the public in a Facebook album titled “Stolen iPhone Adventures.”
“This is Nelson. Nelson has stolen my iPhone,” McCaffrey writes.
From there, the captions only get better, as she remarks on Nelson’s possible love interest — who appears to work at the spa — his “super cool friends” and his affection for snapping pics of Cabo from afar.
According to comments McCaffrey made on the Facebook album, it’s unclear whether Nelson has any idea that the photos are automatically uploading to her Photo Stream account. As New York magazine pointed out, it’s also unclear whether Nelson actually stole the phone, as they try to give him the benefit of the doubt, saying he may have unwittingly bought the phone from someone.
Intentions aside, it’s not likely Nelson will be taking many more pictures on the phone: More than 3,000 people have shared the album and Disney has been notified of the incident, so there’s a good chance Nelson is going to get caught pretty soon.
“I have alerted the officials of the Disney Cruiseline and forwarded them the photos” McCaffrey wrote on Facebook. “Hopefully I’ll get my phone back and maybe some free passes to Disneyland.”
The final one I want to share is that of a spacecraft selfie. I just love this photo of the Rosetta spacecraft from deep space just before it landed on Comet 67P in September 2014.
Beautiful.
[Snow Owl story via cbcnews; iPhone theft story via huffingtonpost; Rosetta selfie via the BBC]
