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A Little Fun

Our cat Sam playing with a toy mouse as a kitten on the hardwood floor of our guest bedroom in 2007

The past couple of days have been so disheartening, let me share a little joy, young Samwise playing with a toy mouse shortly after we adopted him in 2007. He and Emma brought happiness after we mourned the death of our beloved Templeton.

Moths For Breakfast Again? That’s It, I’m Leaving!

A female Gila woodpecker brings a moth to the nest in an old saguaro as the male prepares to leave near an Off-map Trail in McDowell Sonoran Preserve

A female Gila woodpecker brings a moth to the nest as the male prepares to leave (the moth was for the hungry babies inside). The parents brought a variety of insects (and spiders, as she has in her beak below) to their nest in the old saguaro. The male seemed to spend more time in the nest and the female more time hunting during the mornings I watched them. It required a bit of a hike to get to the nest so I couldn’t get there right at first light but it was a treat to watch them nevertheless. I will always be amazed by the relentless energy parents spend getting their babies past those precarious early days.

I also have a 4K clip of them at the nest which I’ll learn to edit at some point and post here. Both pictures are from this spring after we had been in Arizona for about six weeks.

A female Gila woodpecker brings a spider to the nest in an old saguaro as the male prepares to leave near an Off-map Trail in McDowell Sonoran Preserve

We’re Going to Be Alright

Our black cat Emma and our orange tabby kitten Sam sit side by side as they look out the window in my office into the backyard

We adopted Sam and Emma on the same day and kept them together in isolation for the first couple of weeks so they bonded quickly as they played and adapted to their new lives. Emma was about a year older so she and Scout helped raise the little fellow and he was naturally devastated when both his older sisters died young.

The Little Antelope

A side view of a Harris's antelope squirrel standing on a granite boulder with its tail curved along its back

Most of the time I see Harris’s antelope squirrels at a distance as they scurry about their desert home. Sometimes I get lucky and get to watch one up close for a while, it’s always a treat to earn their trust. This little fellow had just finished eating a cactus fruit, you can see some of the green rind he discarded at his feet. The antelopes are smaller than the other ground squirrels in our neck of the desert, the rock squirrel, and different in appearance as well.

I didn’t do any hiking on any of my three days off this weekend as my chronic bowel issues have been bothering me a bit of late and its too risky to take to the trails since I don’t have much warning when trouble is brewing. And while we don’t have any ground squirrels in our neighborhood I nevertheless did see an antelope yesterday as my wife and I attended a few open houses. One house literally had my favorite part of my favorite park behind its backyard and as we pulled up an antelope squirrel (not this one, but he was at the same preserve) ran out of the rocks of the house across the street.

We’re not ready to buy yet, just trying to get a feel for the neighborhoods, and I’m not sure I’d want that long of a commute to work even if it meant I could literally walk out the door to a nearby trail, or a trivial drive to the trailhead I visit most often. But it has me thinking.