Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
The tiger whiptail is one of the lizards I see most often hiking in the Sonoran Desert. They are frequently on the move looking for insects and small lizards and active in the morning when I’m on the trails, so they more easily catch my eye than some of the other lizards. I arrived in Arizona at the end of March, from what I’ve read the tigers are mostly active from April to August so I may not be seeing them much longer.
How many hours have I spent with Samwise sleeping on me? A million? A million billion? It’s in the right ballpark.
The classic image of the saguaro is of arms lifted towards the sky, and many do grow that way, but the arms may twist and turn in all directions, even growing down, like this splendid old example along one of the off-map trails at Brown’s Ranch. I especially liked the unusual ones when we moved here as I could remember them and they helped orient me on a web of trails winding through an unfamiliar environment.
I enjoyed watching the IndyCars return to Portland after a long absence even if I had to watch on TV instead of at the track since they returned to Portland after I left. Congrats to Takuma Sato on the win and to Scott Dixon for extending his championship lead going into the final race. This is Scott signing autographs as a rookie at Portland in 2001, we were both a lot younger then. One of us went on to win multiple championships and one of us blogs about his cats but I’m not going to tell you who is who, I’ll let the mystery be.
The IndyCars came to Phoenix a week after I did but on the heels of the move and my first week at work I didn’t have it in me to go the race, maybe next time. It’s a good sign I didn’t fly back to the race in Portland, earlier in the year I thought if the heat of the summer drove me crazy I might fly back for the race and then go hiking in Washington but I’ve enjoyed my summer in the desert.
Green-winged and cinnamon teal were easy to see at Ridgefield but not so the blue-wings, so it was a special treat to find this lovely fellow in the dew-topped grasses growing in Horse Lake early on a spring morning in 2011. I spent the day at the little refuge, arriving at 6:30am and leaving at 5:30pm.
Lots of exciting camera news around this time as Nikon and Canon finally get serious about mirrorless cameras. I’m thankful for the capabilities of modern cameras, they make it so much easier to take even simple portraits like this one of my beloved Scout at six years old. But even my basic setup of 2007, the Canon 20D and 24-85mm lens, was so much more advanced than the film setup I started with in the 1990’s. Whatever camera you have, shoot the things you love with it, the memories will mean far more than whatever technical flaws exist in the image.
The sun had not yet crested the distant hills as this canyon towhee serenaded me atop a saguaro, a lovely reward for getting out of bed so early on the weekend. It was the only picture I took that day but it was a lovely day on the trails nevertheless. This morning I deliberately slept in as I knew I would be too tired to feel safe driving if I got up at 4 a.m. so I chose a good night’s sleep instead. I see many of the same birds in our backyard as on the trails (we even had a couple of Harris’s hawks perching in the palm trees recently) but with the towhees it’s a bit different, a pair of Abert’s towhees are regular visitors to our feeders but I’ve never seen them in the desert, while canyon towhees have never graced our yard but I’ve seen them many places around the preserve.
Two empty-handed magi discuss whose job it was to bring the presents for the infant king.
Templeton and Scout on the empty hardwood floors of our living and dining rooms in our house in Portland in 2004. We weren’t moving in, we had been there a couple of years. We weren’t moving out, we’d be there fourteen more. We just never had furniture in the front two rooms of the house the entire time we lived there. It was a bigger house than we needed but all of the smaller houses we looked at weren’t as good a fit in other ways. For all of that this house was much smaller than our previous home in Keizer which was ridiculously large for what we needed but again in other ways was the best home for us from what was available. That house was completely carpeted while this one had hardwood throughout but both cats quickly made adjustments to avoid running into cabinets and walls.
Boolie 