The dogs always enjoy their time at the beach. Luna is showing her age and slowing down but still gets out there and smells all the good smells and goes on all the walks.
WordPress no longer lets a user drag and drop images in a particular order in a gallery. If I make any changes, I have to re-number the entire gallery all over again. It seems a small detail but I find it entirely frustrating.
Last month, I got to spend my birthday at the beach. It was my first overnight trip since I returned from Montana in mid-October. A change of scenery is always a good thing. Even if the weather was less than ideal. There was more than one instance of sideways rain. We took lots of books.
WordPress has made the block editor the only way to create a blog post. I have to say that I don’t like it. It is not intuitive and I don’t see any easy to find help for learning to use it. There was no reason to get rid of the old editor and now I need to figure this out or find another platform for My Everyday Photos.
The annual Balloon Roundup in Winthrop happened last weekend. In 2020, it may have been the last big event that happened in the valley. So maybe it’s fitting that it’s the first big event as we begin to see the end of the pandemic. Masks were required to enter the viewing area and attendance was limited to 200 viewers. The weather was not the most cooperative. Friday morning, the balloons hovered over Winthrop and never really got out of town. Saturday morning, they did drift down valley to the airport as usual but the sky was not blue. And Sunday they didn’t go up at all with a threat of snow showers.
The girls.
Two days ago, the girls and I took a road trip to visit Spring. And a little bit of Winter. Our, well my, main goal was to see a Snowy Owl and I managed to do that after one hundred miles of driving. The girls’ main goal was to walk on dirt instead of ice. They managed to do quite a bit of that and enjoyed all the smells of wet dirt and early spring. The snow had just melted in parts of Douglas County and left moist ground, sometime just plain mud, and water all over the place. Water was laying in wheat fields, crossing roads, pouring over coulee walls. Oh, and it was cold enough that much of it was ice-covered.
Sadly, much of what we saw was burned down to dirt in last Labor Day’s Pearl Hill wildfire. Much of the ash has already blown away or been washed away. The vast landscapes look barren with little sagebrush remaining. I had hoped for a few Spring birds but there was nowhere for them to perch or take cover.
The skies were incredibly blue. The snow-covered mountains on the horizons were lovely. Sunshine warmed us. The coulee walls were lit up with lichens. We enjoyed walking on dirt and getting away from our ice and snow-covered world at home.
I saw 54 bird species scattered over numerous habitats. Nothing rare. They were:
Canada Goose
Tundra Swan
American Wigeon
Mallard
Canvasback
Redhead
Ring-necked Duck
Greater Scaup
Lesser Scaup
Bufflehead
Common Goldeneye
Hooded Merganser
Common Merganser
Wild Turkey
California Quail
Pied-billed Grebe
Eared Grebe
Rock Pigeon
Eurasian Collared-Dove
Mourning Dove
American Coot
Common Loon
Great Blue Heron
Golden Eagle
Northern Harrier
Bald Eagle
Red-tailed Hawk
Rough-legged Hawk
Snowy Owl
Belted Kingfisher
Downy Woodpecker
Hairy Woodpecker
Northern Flicker
American Kestrel
Northern Shrike
Steller’s Jay
Black-billed Magpie
American Crow
Common Raven
Horned Lark
Black-capped Chickadee
Pygmy Nuthatch
American Dipper
Varied Thrush
European Starling
House Sparrow
House Finch
Pine Siskin
American Goldfinch
Song Sparrow
White-crowned Sparrow
Dark-eyed Junco
Western Meadowlark
Red-winged Blackbird
My Everyday Photos 