No I was not photographing the topless woman

...or that's my story and I'm sticking with it.

It goes like this:

I was on a walk with my little girl on a path that runs through the nature area near our home. There are backyards backing onto it on both sides.

I kept hearing this unusual (to me) bird call. From one side, a bird would call. From the other side, a bird would respond. Back and forth they went.

Determined to increase my bird knowledge (there's no where to go but up with that), I decided to find one of the birds and photograph it so I could get it identified. I walked through the brush to the edge of the nature area, adjacent to some back yards, and started zooming and clicking toward the tree top where the sound was coming from.

Suddenly I hear a shriek and a dog starts barking right beside me. I still have all of my limbs because his yard was fenced. I hear someone yell at me and look over to see a topless woman in her backyard, leaping up from her lounge chair.

Oopsy daisy!

There I am, up to my waist in wildflowers, camera in hand, lens protruding, staring straight at her.

I was just trying to identify a bird, I say. My voice is inaudible over the barking of the dog.

The woman is frantically putting on a top and running toward me. I may be mistaken but I think she was telling the dog to jump the fence and devour me.

I point up to the tree top to try and act out my explanation. Everyone's a mime in a crisis.

The dog is leaping like a deer by this point. I start racing through my inner Rolodex wondering who in this world would even post bail for me. Fat chance!

Realizing that attempting an explanation was fruitless, I turned off my camera and slowly headed back to the path to meet my girl, who was busy photographing bees and knew nothing of my naked incident. My heart was beating about 9.8 times for every step I took.

By now the woman was watching me from her yard, probably memorizing my face to ensure she could pick me out in the lineup, and the dog was still going nuts. Despite my wish for a small helicopter to land and take us away, nothing arrived so I stayed back a few minutes, pretending to take macros of plants while I actually checked my pictures to make sure I hadn't actually accidentally taken one of the woman when I was startled by her remarkably ferocious dog. How is it that a person can feel guilty simply by imagining that someone else thinks they are guilty when they know they are not? If I had stood there any longer, I probably would have started confessing just to relieve the burden of my non-guilt.

Because the lords of karma evidently owed me one, the police did not swing by on our walk home to confiscate my memory card, so I'm assuming the sunbather decided I was indeed just a camera-toting nature nut. Or kinda liked the whole idea...or they couldn't find us.

And me? I gotta pay a little more attention to my environment when photographing my, um, environment.

Exhibit A


I'm still not sure what type of bird it was. But it's definitely not a booby.