Western Pond Turtle Redux

After doing a few necessary chores - like finally putting away the laundry I washed Thursday night - we started off on our walk, only to have it grind to a halt right away by the sight of the foals right above the circle driveway. That required some minutes for scratching and cooing. At first, the palomino colt was unhappy with the sound of Dino's slicker but eventually figured out that it wasn't a horse-eating monster.

We also spent some time watching a group of twenty or so Western Meadowlarks in one of the open areas on our neighbor's place, right next to the road. Several of them would sing together and what a lovely chorus that was.

When we got to the river, we spotted this Western Pond Turtle sunning him or herself on a rock. They seem to like this area - I took a picture last year of a pair of them, but I wanted to see if I could get a little closer and work with the big lens and what I could get. I started out pretty far back from the bank and worked my way closer. By working, I mean crawling on threes - the fourth was holding the tripod/camera. Crawl a little, stop, take a few shots, crawl a little more. The turtle let me get all the way down to the edge of the riverbank and for once, didn't leap into the water in alarm right away. I was so oblivious to everything else during this process I didn't even notice that someone had driven up on the other side of the river until he asked us what we were looking at. (Turned out he was working on a portion of the fence on that side.)