March 31st, 2025

Ready for yet another Photo Safari Report?  Yay!  Well come on down then!  Let's go!

As you can clearly see from the photo above it was a truly gorgeous day. Perfect for a good long hike.  Joy and I kept trudging along for just over 5 miles and loved every second of it.  We hit up a preserve we rarely go to, not becoz we don't enjoy it, we do!  But because, due to heavy morning commute traffic, it's hard to get to.  Still every once in awhile, we go anyway, patiently waiting for the perfect size gap in traffic to pull a you-ee  and set to.  I'm going to name this one the Animal Uber Hike and I'll explain that in just a minute here.

A few miles into this hike we got to a place that is normally completely flooded over, making it impossible to go any further along that particular trail, so it was a real treat that to be able to hike beyond that spot.  This being the dry season, most of the lake was MIA but there was just enough water left to attract quite a variety of critters including: roseate spoonbills, egrets, crows, ibis and several others.   Very Pretty. Reminds me of a Monet painting :)

They were all very hard at working looking for their breakfasts and therefore were completely  ignoring us.  The ignoring us part was especially important because we also saw a wild hog close by.   Yikes!

Looks a little like the loveable, adorable, Eeyore of Winnie the Pooh fame doesn't he?  Well, just for the record, they are not loveable or adorable. In general they are mean tempered and cranky and just as apt to hurt you as not.  Usually we give them wide berth!  But since he was Very Occupied and on the complete other side of the pond from us, we quietly took our photos and tippy toed onward past him with no problems. Whew!

However, on the way back, we saw that not only was he still there, but he was giving a ride to a crow!  Animal Uber!  LOLOL

We saw a lot of Scrub Jays on this hike which was nice since we haven't seen any in awhile.  They are especially fun to see because they aren't afraid of people and seem to love having their photos taken.  They literally were posing for us!  Here's a set of Scrub Jay pictures:

Yes, there were other birds. Of course there were. Want to check those out too?  Okey dokey:

Got some pretty botanicals too.  Let's face it, on such a beautiful day, it was genuinely difficult to take a bad photo. I did manage of course, but I was shocked at how few pictures I deleted during edit!  Henceforth, trees/ flowers/etc.

And finally, FINALLY, we are starting to capture dragonflies again, which means butterflies cannot be far behind!  Huzzah!

We have, once again, come to the end of another Photo Safari Report.  Hope you enjoyed the Animal Uber Hike.  What could be better than a great hike on a beautiful day with a terrific person, seeing and capturing lovely things AND having a good giggle too.

Hope today is the start of a Fabulous Week for all of you! 

Leaving you with photos of us  (Joy on the left and me on the right)