I took this photo of one of the curve-billed thrasher parents sitting in the nest today. Damsel peeked in the nest earlier and saw that the three eggs still had not hatched. The cholla where the bird is sitting is about 20 feet in front of the courtyard where I captured the image. Click to enlarge.
Much to our surprise, there are three new eggs in the nest where we watched the curve billed thrashers fledge two chicks this spring. I was out in the front of the house taking pictures when I peeked in the nest in our cholla cactus and saw the eggs. In the photo, note the white strands of dental floss; we recycle our floss in the outdoors just for the reason that birds will build nests using string, floss and anything else they can find.
I’m not sure if thrashers raise multiple sets of chicks in a year; the bird book and Wikipedia were silent on that issue. We will be watching to see if these hatch in the next couple of weeks and get more pictures of thrasher chicks if we can. Click on the image to enlarge.
I guess that the javelina knew that we posted a crossing sign (see inset). Late yesterday afternoon at around six PM, the dogs started frantically barking. It turned out that they saw a herd of javelina crossing through our back yard. I ran to get my camera and caught this image of the last of them up on the hill. There were two females, four juveniles and this must be the daddy “cactus rat.”
There aren’t too many things we miss about California, but we do miss our access to the seashore where the California brown pelicans soar along the cliffs. I took this photo of a brown pelican at Point Vicente in Rancho Palos Verdes. It was a sunny day in January of 2010 before we started the move to Arizona.
We miss family and friends, but manage to stay in touch with them. We don’t miss the overcrowded dense-pack of humanity, nor do we miss the sirens, crime rate, graffiti, stupid gun laws, insane politics, etc. Unfortunately, we have to return this month for some business, but we’ll deal with it.
Don’t get me wrong, we love the desert and all the flora and fauna. We used to miss the desert even before we decided to move here.
Click on the image to enlarge.
I hung out the goldfinch feeders last week in hopes of attracting goldfinches. At first, there were lots of house finches (with the red heads), but, finally, over the last couple of days, the goldfinches have arrived. this is three of them on one of the two finch feeders on the hill above the RV Drive. Click on the image to enlarge.
We were standing at the courtyard wall watching the Curve Billed Thrasher nest, when a parent bird returned to the nest to feed the chicks; they are toward the bottom of the frame with their beaks wide open. Click on the image to enlarge.
A little over two weeks ago, we discovered a curve billed thrasher nest in the cholla in front of our house. Today, there are two little chicks in the nest. There were three eggs two weeks ago, but apparently one didn’t make it. To give you an idea as to the size of these little ones, the mouth of the nest is about four to five inches across.
We will keep a lookout for further development. Click on the image to enlarge.
UPDATE: Much to my surprise, I looked into the nest today and saw that Mama Thrasher had deposited another egg in the nest.
