Day 93—My Other Friend, Flicker

Inspired by an article in the paper this morning about where in the Valley to find breathtaking displays of wild flowers, I stopped off at the Roseville Open Space after I left the gym because it’s only a few hundred yards away. There were lovely fields awash in wild flowers. I also saw a pair of great white egrets flying and landing in a dead valley oak, a perching snowy egret keeping an eye on a hunting red shouldered hawk (now I need to search for a nest there), a jack rabbit scurrying for cover from the hawk and a Northern Flicker, whom I heard before I saw.

I took lots of wildflower photos and even one of a dandelion because I was invited to join the Taraxacum Officiale Group on Flickr (all dandelions all the time) after my dandelion photos of yesterday. I took a few of the egrets and the soaring hawk. When I heard the flicker, I sought him out and found him searching for ants on a log. Since it was my first time in this preserve, I wasn’t sure whether I could walk off the path into the fields so I stayed back and zoomed in on the flicker. I still wasn’t as close as I wanted to be so I cropped this and increased the exposure because it was underexposed.