Sunday, March 12…Timekeeper (Grace Potter and The Nocturnals)

   We were aware that last night was time change Sunday, but also aware that it wouldn’t affect us until we started on our homeward journey.  Woke up this morning to Kim announcing it was 9:20 and weren’t we a couple of lazy butts.  I didn’t believe him so he showed me his watch to verify. Dang! Sure enough it’s 9:20. We haven’t pulled that kind of sleeping in since getting back from Hawaii. As I went into the kitchen, I glanced at the wall clock which is a good ol’ fashioned battery-operated clock and it indicated 8:23.  Then checked all other relevant timekeepers in our possession and the consensus was that we woke up at 8:20 instead of 9:20. Still might qualify us as being lazy butts, just not quite as lazy in my mind.

   Apparently, Kim’s Fitbit jumped ahead on its own but then was very reluctant to admit the error of its ways. It resisted multiple attempts to correct the time by syncing it with the Fitbit app on Kim’s phone, but eventually Kim was able to get it to cooperate.  We’ve been coming to Arizona since 2016, and every year without fail we’ve encountered some kind of time glitch on time change Sunday.

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   The Shamrock 5K is this coming Saturday so we decided to do a time trial to see what kind of pace we need to achieve in order to stay under an hour or possibly beat last year’s time of 52:37.  Normally when I go for a walk my camera is slung over my shoulder because I never know when a roadrunner, jack rabbit, or javelina will pop out of a ditch and I want to be ready.  Of course, that means I walk at a slower pace, constantly keeping an eye out for photo ops.  But not today.  Today was about keeping my walk on pace with the metronome in my head.  We kept it under an hour, beat our Coolidge 5K time but not last year’s Shamrock time.  The stopwatch on my phone logged it as 56:18.

   Today it was easy to say that we’ll continue doing our morning walks in such a fashion and I can do the slower photo op walks later in the day.  We’ll see how easy it is to put that into action tomorrow morning. 

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   Early afternoon we took a little ride to check out a tip I received last year. A person posting on the Arizona Birding FB page was kind enough to message me a map of the general location near Marana that she had seen burrowing owls. I’ve kept that message all this time so we could try to find it this year. 

   Last year we drove seventy-five miles to Buckhorn and searched for a couple of hours before finally finding two burrowing owls just as it was getting almost too dark for pictures. Took some anyway…they turned out a bit grainy, but we were tickled that we managed to find them. Finding a location closer really appealed to both of us, especially if the results weren’t guaranteed.  My intent today was just to get a feel for the general location so we could go again someday either early morning or dusk when burrowing owls are most likely to be out of their burrows. Instead, we hit the jackpot…saw two of them sitting along a canal and once we knew what to look for, we found 3 more in various spots along the same canal. Oh, happy day!! They basically look like a lump of brown dirt with eyes and I count myself so fortunate to have seen them during the day.

 Fun Facts about Burrowing Owls:

*They live underground in burrows they’ve dug themselves or taken over from a prairie dog, ground squirrel, or tortoise.

*They are small owls with long legs and short tails. The head is rounded and does not have ear tufts.  Adults have bright yellow eyes.    

*Their size varies in length from 7.5-9.8” …weight is about 5.3 oz… wingspan is in the 21.5” range

*Unlike most owls in which the female is larger than the male, the sexes of the Burrowing Owl are the same size.

*Before laying eggs, they carpet the entrances to their homes with animal dung, which attracts dung beetles and other insects that the owls then catch and eat. They may also collect bottle caps, metal foil, cigarette butts, paper scraps, and other bits of trash at the entrance, possibly signifying that the burrow is occupied. 

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   Found a couple of geocaches and several roadrunners out by the Veterans’ Cemetery in Marana. 

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   Today when we were sitting outside watching the bird feeders, I saw a hummingbird land in the tree and I challenged my camera to get a good picture of it.  I thought it was a ruby throated hummingbird but was totally blown away when it turned to look at me just as I pushed the shutter button...it wasn’t just the throat but an entire ruby head and front bib that flashed at me.  Anna’s Hummingbird caught in all its ruby red glory!

   Also watched a lizard on the tree, running up and down the trunk and jumping between the bigger branches.  I didn’t know that lizards jumped like that. 

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   The desert cam snapped a picture in the wee hours of the morning of a fox enjoying the goodies we put out last night.  Other than the fox and the javelina last evening, there’s been no more action out there.  A bobcat came strolling by the Nutt Rd. cam last night and a crow was in there today.  Would love to see that deer again, though.

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40 Days of Lent challenge: Encouraged to listen to today’s sermon entitled Letting Go: Enemies (Us vs. Them).  We listened to the sermon as we were driving to Marana.  Listening to it together gives us an opportunity to talk it over. Chip did an excellent job in presenting a very relevant topic in a non-threatening manner.  Lots of good points to mull over.


 

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