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.
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.
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