June 06th, 2023

In spite of the temperatures climbing a bit, Joy and I went out on Photo Safari yesterday.  We left extra early and kept the hike to a far more reasonable 2 hours in an effort to avoid heat  stroke.  We are smart that way.

The only problem with hiking early is that often we are the only ones in the vicinity that are awake.    The very things we are hoping to photograph are still snuggied up in their little beds, all comfy and cozy and snoozing away.  Despite knowing that, we still went out early in that gorgeous early morning light to see what else there was to see.

Turned out, all of the birds got up extra early too.  And even better, it seemed to be Family Day~!  So many of the birds we saw were not just one representative of the species but of pairs!  Sometimes entire families! Love it!  Group Photos!    So this is the Family Day Hike!  Very appropriate since Joy & I are family too :)

Let's see how many "family portraits" I managed to capture:

Three?  Is that all?  I know we saw a lot more. Oh wait a minute. Sometimes I couldn't get capture them both in the same frame so I had to take individual shots.  Let's try this again:

Well, there were more. There truly were, but I guess I missed a few.  Oh well.  I have some single bird shots too.  Wanna see those? I would like to point out that most of these supposedly "single" birds were actually in pairs or groups, I just only managed to captured them one at a time.  Drat!

It was sort of a happy accident that as we continued up and down the trails, noticing all of these bird groups and taking pictures of them, at the same time  Joy and I were also catching each other up on what was happening in our families!  What's the news?  How are the kids?  It's so nice to hear about her girls (and boys) and I love talking about my boys (and girls).  Guess it put the entire day and me  in a family state of mind :)

Enough with the birds!  What else did we see?  Well, I did get a few nice botanicals:

And one truly awesome spider web complete with spider!

Voila!

The Family Day Hike with at least some birdie families represented :)  Hope you enjoyed!

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