The Odd Sock: Today's walk report: 061922

Last Sunday there was a walk and Docken tele-walked with me then as she did today (thank you, Dockie!) but last week there were only 28 pictures taken and they were all useless. I think I did a little better today. Here are the photos (out of 125)...

On my way into the campus I saw this guy seemingly a little perturbed that the inbound gate to the campus was closed. A lot of people just enter the the outbound gate (it's open, I know it doesn't appear to be) and maneuver over at the first break in the medium to the proper side. That's only about 45 yards or 41 meters in, however I suspect the turning radius on this Rolls would not have made that easy. I grew up around this campus, it was never gated shut here at the main entrance, in fact, there were no gates. I also remember a speed limit sign which read, 8 MPH. I guess they got fed up with all of that.

A couple 100 yards later I spotted this Cooper's hawk. I didn't get nearly as close as I would have liked to. In fact, I didn't realize this was a Cooper's until I got home.

Onto the garden...

This little cottontail was so tiny and still that from a greater distance than this shot I thought it was a rock.

It was quiet in the garden again today but of course there was male Calypte anna hummingbird, Dusty. There were, in fact, three male Anna's hummingbirds in the same general area this time. Dusty and one other seemed to be rather tolerant of each other. The third male was being chased away by both of them. I only took pictures of Dusty.

I'm not sleeping, I'm just resting my eyes!

Nearby, this female Calypte anna hummingbird was minding her own business. I took a few pictures of her last Sunday but they were horrible. Part of the probelm last week is I was wearing a new pair of sunglasses and shooting into shadowy areas is impossible with those glasses. Way too dark. For the most part the sun coming in at 7-8 AM is rather blinding so I like to keep them on if possible. The shrub is a Baja fairy duster (Calliandra californica).

The century plant (Agave americana) is still taking its sweet time opening flowers.

I mentioned last week the basal rosette at the base of the plant is already dying back and with a 70-300 mm lens it was difficult getting a representational image of that. I forgot to bring a shorter lens again. This is a vertical panorama of two images. If you look carefully (please click the image) you can see that several of the spiny leaves are seriously drooping.

I ended up wandering around quite a bit just to get some walking in. I haven't been over to this sort of park area in a while. They recently did some pruning on the trees and I think that was, at least in part, responsible for revealing this huge nest. This is a little over midway up the trees. The only thing I can figure is squirrels but this is absolutely massive. Squirrels may reuse nests multiple times but of all the actual nests and images of nests I've ever seen I've never seen anything quite like this.