Springtime means more than just flowers, especially for the cholla in our front yard. It has had several flowers like the one I posted a couple of days ago. Today, I discovered that a pair of curve-billed thrashers built a nest in the cactus and there are three eggs in it (see inset in photo above). After the discovery, we went out to the courtyard to photograph one of the parents incubating the nest (since the mom & dad take turns). Click on the image to enlarge.
Readers here have long-known of our distaste for wind turbines. On our commute from Arizona to California and back, we traverse over forty miles along I-10 where the scenic desert landscape and snow-capped mountain peaks are obscured by the flailing fans.
Other than the asthetic downside, wind energy costs orders of magnitude more than coal or hydroelectric per kilowatt hour to produce. That means more cost to the consumer.
We have also known that these installations also endanger wildlife; now, it appears that The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a division of the Interior Department is going to make it OK for turbines to kill the previously endangered bald eagles:
From Planet Gore
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a division of the Interior Department, is considering loosening regulations on the killing of bald eagles, the national bird of the United States, to accommodate the development of wind energy sources.
A draft regulation first filed in April would allow businesses to apply for 30-year permits allowing them to kill bald eagles in the course of other legal activities. The length of those permits would be a six-fold increase over the five-year window allowed under current law.
[more]
Ron, one of our friends on the River, made this cute little yellow birdhouse for us. Today, I took it out to my “musical mesquite” tree, where I hang wind chimes and other colorful decorative things, and hung it on one of the branches. We want to hang it higher in the tree to encourage birds to occupy it, but we left it where it was when a wind gust came up and knocked over my mini-greenhouse up in the courtyard. We ran up there and cleaned up the mess in the courtyard. Amazingly, we did not lose any of the plants in the courtyard or in the greenhouse. Click on the image to enlarge.
Today was family day for us in Southern California. We visited my sister and family before going over to my Mom’s house. We went back to the house afterwards and dropped the dogs off so we could go do some food shopping. When we got back from the supermarket, Beethoven greeted us from his lookout post as we pulled into the driveway. Click on the image to enlarge.
I spotted this pea hen on a neighbor’s roof. Their house is about eight-hundred feet down the road from our house. We have seen peafowl in the downtown area, but never this far out into our semi-rural area.
I looked at peafowl on the internet and think that this is a female Indian peafowl. She was just standing on the roof in the shade of a couple of eucalyptus trees. Click on the image to enlarge.
I was taking pictures of some of the beautiful spring cactus flowers in the neighborhood when this little guy dashed out from under one of the cacti. A quick scan through my “Desert Critters” reference book and couldn’t find a lizard exactly matching this one. A “zebra tail” was listed but had different markings elsewhere. Click on the image to enlarge.
