Up early again and out walking, with each doing our own thing again. Today Mom extended her distance by a couple hundred yards; Kim and I each turned around at Nutt Rd, although we walked at different paces. My shins and ankles have been angry with me ever since the Shamrock walk; I guess I’m paying the price for walking as fast as I did. While I’ve been walking in spite of the discomfort, I haven’t been pushing it. So, again, I was the last one back to camp.
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Took a
quick trip into Casa Grande to get a caliper so Kim could try to figure how to
get the new guide system to work on the big scope. Found a food truck in Eloy for lunch then
headed back to camp.
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Kim
was anxious to get to work on his new guider so I decided that Mom and I would
check out Fort Lowell Park in Tucson. I’d read that there were numerous sport fields/courts,
walking paths and birds. The weather was perfect for a leisurely stroll…just
had to drive an hour to get there.
Fort Lowell
Park was our end goal, but the first stop was Tucson Camera Repair. We have a camera with a sticky shutter button
and going to Fort Lowell put me in proximity of the repair shop. On a bike trip
last September, my camera accidentally got left outside overnight. It rained
and the camera fell in the dirt. Ever since then it’s felt like there’s dirt
underneath which was preventing it from operating smoothly. I replaced that
camera when we got home; it would still take good pictures if the shutter
button worked correctly. The estimate for repairs will be done by Monday, then
we can decide to precede with the repair or retrieve it and have it repaired back
home. But we’re really thinking it
should be a quick clean out.
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Started out at Fort Lowell Park by wandering
around a pond which was a gathering place for ducks and turtles. Encountered a
duck that was totally new to me. The prominent feature on the male was a white
stripe starting at the top of its head and extending down to its bill. When the sun hit it just right, it seemed luminous.
And it had a patch of iridescent green cascading from the back of its eye down
its neck. As is typical in the animal/bird world, the female wasn’t quite as
flashy. So grateful that a nearby sign
identified it as an American Wigeon.
There were a couple of other ducks that fell into the Mutt Duck category…a
result of crossbreeding which produces a hybrid that defies strict identification. But they were pretty.
The turtles were red-eared sliders. So, so many of them! There were several by the edge of the pond that
I was trying to photograph; it wasn’t easy as they kept ducking into the water.
I suddenly keyed into a patch of feathers in the water, realized that it was a
dead duck and was mortified to see the turtles were actually eating it! No
way!! Turtles eat birds? Ewww! So, I looked it up when I got home…on a Red-Eared
Slider Forum page (Turtle Talk) one person saw their slider catch and eat a
bird and wondered if anyone else had ever seen that happen. Turns out that, yes, sliders are very capable
of catching, drowning, and eating a bird. I thought the bird had died a natural
death and happened to fall into the water, but now I have to wonder if the turtles
caught it.
After wandering around the pond, we headed
over a bridge to a grove of mesquite trees. That’s where we saw ladder-backed
woodpeckers and watched a vermillion flycatcher as it flitted around the trees and
a baseball field.
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I couldn’t resist a detour to see if any burrowing owls were out. Mom scored first…she saw one standing in a field next to a pile of dirt. It disappeared into the burrow before I could take a picture, but I took one anyway. Surprised when I looked at it on the computer and saw that there was another owl standing off to the right of the one who pulled the disappearing act. Bingo! Then we saw two more standing on the canal edge…I like to think they were waiting there just for us.😎
In the same area we saw a couple of crows
take flight but realized that one had a white band on its tail and wings. That one’s not a crow…look at it, there’s
white on his tail. OMGoodness, it’s a
caracara! Snapped a quick picture before it took off again.
Michigan doesn’t have ladder-back woodpeckers so that was a first for both my mom and me, as was the American Wigeon. And she hadn’t seen a vermillion flycatcher or a caracara before, either. And once when the truck window was open, Mom said she heard a red-winged blackbird call…I told her I had never seen one out here. Plenty of them at the feeder at home, but never out here. Then a mile down the road what do we see sitting on a grass covered mound of dirt? A red-winged blackbird! Mom gets the Eagle-Eye Award for finding the burrowing owl in a field and the Golden Ear Award for hearing and recognizing the song of the blackbird. 🏆
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Kim thinks he got his new off-axis guider to
work. He got it to focus on a tree this
afternoon; the real prize will be getting it to find a target. However, the clouds are not helping his
efforts.
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Yesterday we saw two ghost bikes, but
traffic prevented us from stopping; however, I did see the name James Ramsay
written on a sign on one of them. I searched for the name online and found that
on Aug. 7, 2022, James was the victim of a hit and run accident. He was taken
to the hospital for treatment of severe wounds and was still there when he died
on Aug. 16, 2022. I haven’t been able to
find anything that states the driver of the car has been apprehended.
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40 Days of Lent
opportunity: Share a Bible verse
with someone, either in person or on social media. I forgot about this
today so tonight I read the Message version of my favorite verse to Kim…Matthew
6:34. “Give your entire attention to what God is doing
right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow.
God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.”
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