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Mom made it one electrical pole farther on our walk today; I continued to Nutt Rd. Kim had some work to do at the telescope this morning and last night’s picture to process so he didn’t get to walking until about 11 o’clock.
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While Kim was out walking, Mom and I took a ride to the end of Picacho Hwy because she was curious about long it was, what was at the end of it, etc. Got to the end and then we started exploring…followed gravel roads that were well maintained and probably routinely travelled by farm equipment. Surrounded by plowed fields, cotton fields, and lush green fields of something. It was a nice drive through a little agricultural world I didn’t know existed and the roads eventually led back to Picacho Hwy.

Saw a bird on top of an electrical pole, got my camera on it and was excited to see what I thought was a Kestrel. A Kestrel is a little falcon about the size of a mourning dove and has been one of my bird ‘wanna sees’. A little farther down the road, we came across another one that eventually landed in a tree long enough to for me get a decent picture. Felt incredibly lucky to come across two of these little dynamos today. Checked the bird book when we got home and then verified it on the Arizona Birding page…female American Kestrel.
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As of last night, we hadn’t seen any pictures from the camera we put down by the hawk nest. Because of how high the nest is in the cactus Kim had set the sensitivity level to 9…anything moves and we should see it. But nothing was happening last night.

This morning there were picture notifications, so it was exciting to me that the camera was working; it was not so exciting to see that it had taken sixty-eight pictures of the sun between 8:31 and 10:30 a.m. The sun had fully moved out of the picture frame by 10:30 but something was tripping the motion sensor and it didn’t appear to be the hawks. Every time the sun moved a degree it must have snapped a picture. That’s apparently what happens when the sun is on the rise, the camera is facing East and set to a level 9 sensitivity. While it’s good to see that the camera was working, we were kind of hoping for some hawk action, not a minute-by-minute capture of the moving sun. Need to rethink our strategy on this one.
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We had planned to drive to Tortilla Flat today but the timing just wasn’t right, so we drove over to Saguaro National Park instead. Watched a movie in the visitor’s center then went in search of the paved Desert Discovery path. We knew it was an easy stroll through the desert landscape. On the way there, two coyotes crossed the road in front of us…looked like an adult and its youngster to me but Kim thinks it may have been a male and female. We’ll never know because I didn’t get a picture of the smaller one and only got the larger one as it was heading into the scrub on the side of the road. We’ll each happily live with our conclusions.
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Since the burrowing owls are about 3 miles from the route we take to Saguaro Nat’l Park, we made a slight detour to go see what we could see of them. Happy to report that we saw eleven owls on our reconnaissance mission tonight, including the two that Kim refers to as Fred and Ethel. We’ve seen two owls in the same vicinity every time we’ve driven along the canals on Hardin Road. It’s easy to assume they’re the same two every time. I feel like they should recognize the truck by now.
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Clear night for imaging…there were some minor adjustments to be made to the new set-up but nothing that Kim couldn’t eventually figure out.
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40 Days of Lent opportunity: Help someone with a task that has to be done. I totally zoned on this one today.
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