Officially, happy Halloween. Yesterday I thought I was going to work on something very different today and not post but I changed my mind and went for a late morning walk. It was cool, about 60ยบ F, and it was cloudy, gray. I tried to make up for that in these images. Overall it was a very nice excursion.
Here are some of the over 800 pictures I took. I, in fact, in some instances, took too many pictures and in my haste to do this post I might not have picked the best ones. It happens.
Red-tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) seemed everywhere again but I was moving around quite a lot and so were they, so from one spot to the next I may have been seeing a couple of the same birds in different locations. Nevertheless, there were at least three.
I had to stop to take a picture of this mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos).
Tulbaghia violacea, I believe...
This is an obligatory crow shot for Halloween.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned how my seeing Northern Flickers (Colaptes auratus) was a rarity. Maybe that has changed. I saw at least four of them today. Two pairs of male and female birds. While they do engage in the common woodpecker eating behavior of poking holes in trees looking for insects, Northern flickers spend a lot of time on the ground. They are voracious ant eating birds.
But the star of the show today was this Great Egret (Ardea alba). I was on the top of the hill facing near north and this bird was slightly down hill but the tree put us on an almost equal elevation. For my closet shots I was just under 22 meters away.
On the other hand, the goats were approximately 291 meters away.
Hawks are magnificent. Egrets are beautiful.
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