A Hopeful New Year

January 1, 2021

This pretty Western Bluebird pair liked our water dish but not our seed feeders.

We were shocked to see this Northern Cardinal visit us today!

Even the lowly House Finch enjoyed our water dish.

Lots of nice purple Santa Rita prickly pear planted along the road.

This Broad-billed hummer actually sat still for a while and showed off his blue throat and red bill.

Today we decided that we wouldn't have the time or energy to do a ride as we needed to go grocery shopping and move the trailer to another site in the campground.

Because Don had made a last minute reservation while we were at Kartchner Caverns, it had been difficult to find a site that was open for 4 consecutive nights. This is a very poplular park.

Originally we had planned to head for Fort Davis State Park in west Texas at this time of the Arizona portion of our trip, but since they had just had snow, we decided to extend our vacation in Arizona.

Anyway, we couldn't move to our new site since the people in it hadn't moved out so we went ahead and did our shopping. The rangers call this the "Catalina Shuffle"!

By the time we got back, the other folks had left so we were able to start moving our stuff over. It was handy that the new site was located right behind our old one so we could hand carry many things over! But the move still took a couple of hours to get everything shifted, and our power and water hooked back up.

I had worried about the birds finding the new location for their feeders, but it wasn't long before they were back at it. Don said he thought that some of them actually followed him over as he carried the feeder to the new tree!

Soon things were back to normal, bird-wise. We had a laugh as we watched the Gila woodpecker hang on the hummers nectar feeder to eat. Guess he had a sweet tooth!

So far our bird list keeps growing. We've had: Lesser Goldfinches, Rosy House Sparrows, Lark Sparrows, Gila Woodpeckers, Cardinals, Western Bluebirds, Mockingbirds, Mourning Doves, Blue Jays, Cooper's Hawks, Black Chinned hummers, Broadbilled hummers, Cactus Wrens, Quail and White Crowned Sparrows. Even a road runner sauntered through camp looking for food debris on the ground.

To make all of the different species happy, we had hung up a tube feeder and bell shaped feeder that had larger seeds such as sunflower along with peanuts. The birds are voracious eaters. We can hardly keep up refilling the feeders!

Don watched one woodpecker on the tube feeder. It would pick out a peanut in one hole then decide that the nut wasn't to its liking and would put it back in the tube through another hole. Strange!

After resting a bit, we did some dancing on this beautiful, sunny afternoon. It was so sunny that we were finally able to put out our awning for a while.

But soon, the sun began to set and it grew colder out so we headed back in for dinner and some movies.

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