Month: August 2017

A front page article in the August 4th edition of the Bend Bulletin, shouted that California Tortoiseshell Butterflies blanketed central Oregon for the couple of months before I arrived.  These black and orange beauties were reported to fill the air in dense clouds at ground zero, Sparks Lake where we were headed the next day.  I was excited that I might find some spectacular sights there until I got to the end of the article which basically said the butterflies had disappeared by now.  I wondered about the timeliness of the article.  Our visit to Sparks Lake the next day yielded a paltry few Butterflies sitting at the edge of the water with closed wings so the brilliant orange and black pattern was not visible.  A missed spectacle for sure.  The newspaper must have needed a filler that day.  However, before we left to drive to the lake, I went out to the front garden with its inviting rudbeckia and noticed a lone California Tortoiseshell Butterfly sipping nectar from the center of the cone flowers.  It kept its wings closed most of the time except when it flew to another flower.  I managed to get only a single shot of the open wings.

More from the 2017 Redmond Rodeo…saddle bronc riding.

We were in the Deschutes National Forest on the way to the head of the Metolius River which bubbles up out of an icy cold spring and emerges as a full-sized river.  The Golden Mantled Ground Squirrels, as close as we get to chipmunks here, pranced around us, clearly acclimated to people.  This little guy squeezed between the railings of a fence and watched me take his photograph as he relaxed in the midday heat. He clearly had the laid back attitude of Alvin the Chipmunk.

 

Taken mere moments before we cut our outing short and headed to the Emergency Room to tend to my brother’s mangled hand, this is the Deschutes River as it emerges from its point of origin, Little Lava Lake.  As I took the photograph, I leaned against the dead tree that was moments away from attacking Arthur.

 

It seems that my visits to see my brother in Bend, Oregon are cursed.  When I first visited in January, the area was experiencing record snowfall.  I couldn’t see the house because six to eight feet of snow engulfed it.  My current visit coincided with a record heat wave with 100° days, 20° over average highs for this time of year.  And, a tap-tap-tapping on the roof that caught my attention revealed yet another unwelcome situation somehow associated with my visits here. A pair of pygmy nuthatches has excavated a hole in the chimney siding.  While they’re cute to me, they’re not as cute to my brother.

After writing this blog post Saturday morning we took a drive through the Cascade Lakes area. We stopped to admire the headwaters of the Deschutes River and my brother, as boys are wont to do, tried to push over a dead tree. The tree pushed back so we ended up at Emergency and Art got stitched back together.

I know I am not really responsible for any of these occurrences, but the proximity of my visits to these unfortunate events makes me wonder if I’ll be invited back.

One of the early events at the 2017 Redmond Rodeo was calf roping.

 

The bull riders were last up at the 2017 Redmond Rodeo and it was dark by then but it was worth the wait.   Yeehaw!

 

 

 

 

 

Back to Madera Canyon and a female Black-chinned hummingbird hovering near the feeder.

This is the magnificent Mr. Wonderful (a Magnificent Hummingbird) in the second of two in-flight shots I managed to capture of him in Madera Canyon, AZ.  In the first (click here) he’s a little more colorful and shows some of the purple crown which isn’t visible in this photograph.