February 13th, 2024

This was Joy and I out in the wild last Friday.  We were just ahead of a controlled burn. Seriously!  As we were leaving, we drove past the fire trucks and saw the actual burning going on.  Kind of exciting.  We had no photos of the fire or the equipment or the firefighters, sorry.  You will have to settle for some other stuff instead.  

Joy came up with the name for this Photo Safari - The Doubleback Hike.  That is because we did a whole lot of doubling back on the trails due to puddles.  Not itty bitty no big deal fun to splash in puddles.  Nope that would have been fine.  These were ankle deep (at least) muddy, murky, goopy, I-don't-know-what's-in-there puddles that we couldn't jump across, walk around (without going too far off trail) or build a frond bridge over and we just weren't in the mood for slogging through  muck that day.  Sooooo instead we did a lot of doubling back.  

Here are some of the puddles:

Poet e.e.cummings famously wrote "...the world is mud luscious and puddle wonderful..."  and that is an adorable mental image but mucky wet feet for hours doens't thrill us at all.

​  The day started out cool and warmed up a bit as we went along. But it was the sky that really struck me.  It was at  least a zillion different shades of cloudy and light through our hike. The colours kept changing which meant our photos kept changing too.  We kept wondering if it was going to rain.  It caught my eye and therefore my camera:

But it was a great day for birds.  A GREAT day for birds.  Hope you like birdie pictures because here come a lot of them.  There were times when all we had to do was stand in one spot snapping away because they were everywhere around us.  

The only birds we saw that were NOT in the above set were bluebirds. We saw so many bluebirds.  More than we have EVER seen! It was crazy!   AND, the most exciting part (to us anyway) is that for the very first time, we saw a bluebird nest!  Holy Cats!  I will show you othe nest photos first just because that's the part I am most jazzed about.  The photos in this next set were kindly sent to me my Joy because my  photos didn't turn out which really ticked me off.  Can't blame anyone but myself. Operator error! Thanks Jo!

How Cool Is That???  Her pictures are just so dang good.

Hang on to your poptarts because the next set is Just Bluebirds and now we are back to my photos.  If it's too tedious looking at a bunch of photos of the same kind of birds, feel free to skip ahead.  I dont' mind. I probably wont' even notice

Enough with the birds already!  I agree.  How about if I move on to flowers.  Things are starting to bloom a little bit here and there so there were a few more flowers than lately.  I'll just post a few:

Lastly, my favourite category, the Randos.  I haven't posted much in the way of random, uncategorizable pictures lately.  I think I will make up for that here. It's a little bit of this and a little bit of that.  Photograhic Flotsam:

There you have it, the Doubleback Hike!  Those bluebird nests really were amazing!  Thanks for the photos once again Joy!

I will find another topic to write about later this week, I promise!

In the meantime, have fun and be safe!