Now that I’m back home and have my camera, I’ve been taking photos when something interesting pops up in my backyard. From my cardinal couple, quail, finches and roadrunner, there’s been lots of action. Throw in a few chipmunks and I’ve taken a lot of pictures!
I’m impressed with this chipmunk’s balance on two legs.
I think this sweet bird is a female house finch?
This roadrunner actually laid down in our yard, waiting for prey. He had his eye on the chipmunk but left without any luck.
Mrs. staring at me taking while I took her picture.
Red found himself fending off quail to get a bite of birdseed.
Another shot of the roadrunner. Isn’t he beautiful?
Do you have a favorite of my backyard buddy pics? If so, which one?
I had a visitor for most of yesterday. The visit began early in the morning as I was writing my morning pages. I kept seeing a huge shadow swooping past the casita window. It had to be my Harris Hawk.
He landed on the fence and kept watch.
I went for a walk and came back home to discover the hawk was no longer on the fence.
Instead he landed in a tree.
As I was writing this post, he began to call for a friend
Flying by our window a second hawk screeched with talons outstretched, wings spread wide, five feet off the ground, going in for the kill. He flew over the fence into the bushes. I missed the action.
Eventually, the second hawk settled into the tree. Behind a branch with the other hawk.
Can you spot the two hawks in the tree?
I watched in awe as a hummingbird landed on hawk number one’s head. The second hawk was attacked by smaller birds including house finches. The little birds are not fans of hawks. The quail are keeping away. They must be prime targets of the hawks.
And then there were three.
One hawk is hidden from view, preferring the other side of the tree.
I signed up for an intro to digital photography class through Maricopa Community Colleges. The class begins late January and runs through May. I hope my hawks are around to model for my class.
Here’s a LINK to the Harris Hawk’s call from Cornel l Lab All About Birds website.
There are three little towns we pass through on our way from Scottsdale to the Mexico border. This is the stretch that I usually drive. I wonder what it would be like to grow up in a small town like those? What are the people like? What do they do? There’s poverty, graffiti in some and EBT stickers on store and restaurant windows. But these town are very much alive. You can see pride in neat yards with most homes and businesses well taken care of.
Here are the three towns we drive through, starting at the border heading north.
WHY
The population in Why at the 2010 census was approximately 167.
Why is the smallest of the three towns. There is a sign pointing down a dirt for a Rock Shop that we npass by. I wonder if they get any business? There’s also a combination busy gas station, store, and cafe called the Why Not Travel Store. I learned Why has it’s own radio station! I almost hit a large dog running across the road.
I thought the town was called Why because WHY WOULD ANYONE LIVE HERE?
From Wiki:
The town derives its name from the fact that two major highways, State Routes 85 and 86, originally intersected in a Y-intersection.[ At the time of its naming, state law required all city names to have at least three letters, so the town’s founders named the town “Why” as opposed to simply calling it “Y.”
I saw this mural in Ajo when we stopped at a gas station. This is a sign for an adjacent “resort.”
Ajo (pronounced AH-hoh) is a much bigger town than Why. On the drive, the speed limit slows to 25 mph as you wind through the residential and business streets. At one turn you pass two beautiful white churches. One is Catholic and the other a Federated Church. This is a very scenic part of town with Spanish style plazas and buildings.
Ajo is the Spanish word for garlic (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈaxo]). The Spanish may have named the place using the familiar word in place of the similar-sounding O’odham word for paint (oʼoho). The Tohono O’odham people obtained red paint pigments from the area.
We stopped yesterday so I could get the photo of the Space Age Lodge (above). I’ve been fascinated with it since we first drove through. It’s funky space age relic from the 1960s that thankfully somebody let survive.
It has small Mexican restaurants, deserted mom and pop motels as well as name brand fast food restaurants and grocery stores. Interstate 8 runs through it west to San Diego and east to Tuscan.
From Wiki:
Gila Bend founded in 1872, is a town in Maricopa County, Arizona, United States. The town is named for an approximately 90-degree bend in the Gila River, which is near the community’s current location.[4] As of the 2020 census, the population of the town was 1,892.[3]
Stovall’s Space Age Lodge opened in 1965, according to a brief history on the back of the Lodge’s restaurant menu. A local wheeler-dealer named Al Stovall was its visionary. He had friends in the military and government, and his connections got him autographed photos of astronauts, which he hung on the walls of the Lodge’s restaurant. He also owned a plastics factory, which produced the custom space-age decorations that made his motel the closet thing to the Jetsons this side of the 23rd century.
I was so excited about voting for the first time in Arizona. But now I’m not happy. As of Thursday, less than 70% of the ballots have been counted.
We don’t know the outcome. I remember knowing who won elections by 8 or 9 p.m. for decades.
There were 70 out of 223 polling places that had issues with tabulators and printers. How did that happen?
Unfortunately, I am losing confidence in the election results. I wish they’d at least give hourly updates of the vote count. But they are releasing one vote count at 6 p.m. each day. Then to confuse things even more, some reporters are releasing counts, but where are they getting the information? All day Wednesday they counted and they only added 6% to the vote count. Now Maricopa County announced they have 400,000 outstanding ballots and won’t finish counting them until sometime next week!
What is going on?
Do you have confidence in your state elections? Were there any snafus or weird stuff going on like in Arizona?
