Weekend walk report: Toy Drive

 The event was this...

 

Motor4Toys claims to be the "world's largest automotive toy drive" and a huge annual event. I was certainly impressed. My walks were Saturday, December 6th and Sunday, December 7th. The images for the toy drive on Saturday represented dozens of people in preparation for the event on Sunday. I knew nothing about any of this before I got to the college campus. All images are in the order in which they were taken.

I decided I would like this tree for my Christmas tree. I would also like to have that rock for Christmas.

 Cooper's hawk (Astur cooperii) was reclassified from the genus Accipiter to the genus Astur as a result of a major taxonomic revision published in 2024. Amazing eyes.

 The toy drive. As I was approaching I was in bright light and pretty far away, while this was all in shadows. I mentioned to Docken over the phone (thank you Doc for joining me) that I thought I was walking into a movie filming.

There were, perhaps, 1,000 bikes and trikes.

 Meanwhile, I was a little slow on this. Two ravens trying to chase off a red-tailed hawk. This is not a rare event.

 
Sunday, December 7th (today).

A scrub jay on top of the weather station's instruments, proudly holding an acorn.

 
For the most part I avoided the crowd. It was a remarkable event. The lines of large plastic bags were items distributed from yesterday's piles of boxes. Each bag appeared to contain at least a dozen toys.

 There are the ancient cars too and their worshipers.

 A 1985 Backdraft Cobra replica is a modern, high-quality replica of the classic AC Cobra, built by Backdraft Racing, a company that started in 2001.

This is a custom Humvee, I have no idea how that can manage any bumps in the road. Apparently it has a 10” air suspension lift but even so, this vehicle is low to the ground.

America.

I call this picture, "James Rebar." Oddly enough, last week I thought there was a bird atop one of the rods and that it would make an interesting close-up shot but it turned out to be some sort of label. There's one here though. I totally missed seeing it until I got home. Can you find the bird?

Joni Mitchell - Shiny Toys