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I had a rare bird sighting yesterday! A HuffinPuffin2 showed up at Riding Shotgun Travelbug University!
We had a good talk (probably too long because we both had things to do – he had a lot of caches to go find) and shared some ideas about local caches.
Speaking of hummingbirds, we’ve had several here for a few months now. I think we had a couple Caliope that were passing through stop by, but now we’re back to the Rufous. I really like this time of night, when the sphinx moths come out. They will let me stand right next to them when they are visiting our petunias in our hanging baskets on our deck.
We’re also luck to have all three types of swallowtails indigenous to this area stopping by on a regular basis. I miss the Giant Swallowtails we had back in New Richmond, but these have their own beauty. My current favorite is the Lorquin’s Admiral:
That picture really doesn’t do them justice. This one is a little bit better:
I remember seeing them in catalogs when I was kid, and collecting butterflies. For being such a dry region, we’re finding that having the irrigation on and some water in the garden (making mud) we have more butterflies than I can quickly identify coming from all over the place.
One more bird story. I was tutoring at school last night and got a text from my wife, a picture, asking “are these baby quail?” Sure enough. They were in a window well in our backyard (we are a rare house out here with a basement) and that area is where we let our dogs “out”. The dogs’ eyes were getting yellow, but she wouldn’t let them out until I got home to help decide what to do.
Well, mom quail was down there with them, so she flew a short distance off and started calling them. I started shoveling them up one by one by hand. They were fuzzballs about the size of a ping pong ball. The first cluster found her, but the stubborn ones didn’t get to her before the clutch ran off. The last two were put into a bucket and we started wandering around, listening for either the mom or the babies, but they were all quiet. After a short search, we managed to spook the mom out of a bush and put the two down for her to come back to – I also spotted a couple siblings hiding silently in the brush under the bush.
Success! Dogs were relieved (pun intended) to be let out, and then the problems started anew. One of the last ones we scooped up was by the goat shed, still in the dog area, and not with mom. More scrambling to catch it and our son finally had it in hand. It was placed where we had dropped off the last two. Then my avatar found another one in a different bush. Removed the dogs from the scene and started to get that one scooped up. Then the boy realized the cover under the bush was swarming with fuzz balls. Seems like the original swarm we released had gone there, and not where we thought they were.Long story short – the decision was made to let mom and dad quail do their job in gathering up the kids. Not long afterwards, we saw the dad swoop in from one side and run to the bush with all the kids in it, so we’re assuming all is well. The dogs keep looking for, but not finding, quail. We figure we have at least four separate pairs coming in from different compass directions to get to our feeder. They will even come up now when we’re sitting on the deck!
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