Catching Up

I'm trying to get caught up from the last couple of weeks, Tasks have intruded on my life with blog. I didn't get to Dryad Ranch this past weekend, but Dino did and evidently there may be more photos, which I believe I'll get to see tonight.

Sunday before last, we'd planned on a long walk up our neighbor's hill and across the ridge, where we walked this time last year and saw the golden eagle, but was raining and windy that morning. Shrug, Mother Nature does what she's going to do, and no complaints about rain.

I continue to be fascinated by fungi - is there an -"itis" associated with this? A while back I didn't bother taking pictures of some mushrooms I saw because I didn't want to muck around on the wet ground with the horse poop they were growing in. Those particular ones had what looked like little spines growing down from the cap. These don't have spines, but are interesting nevertheless.

Noticing a lot more wildflowers now - these are baby blue eyes. There is quite a group of them down in the sandy area right next to our part of the river. I didn't even see the little insect on the left while I was photographing this flower until I was editing when I got back - it wasn't there in the early shots. Now it's a famous insect, known world wide on the internet.

All of the pine siskins have decamped to wherever they go, so we'll be noticing a decrease in the need to fill the niger seed feeders, which they shared with the goldfinches. More hummingbirds have been arriving - we had three or four resident Anna's over the winter, ten days Dino counted seven with the probability of more. So where the seed requirements go down, the sugar water requirements go up. Yesterday, I bought two bags of sugar and wanted to tell the grocery store clerk that it wasn't for me but I figured that really she didn't care anyway.