AZ Nature In Focus

  A little while ago I talked about the lessons that I learn from nature during my journeys.  Patience is among the lessons that I keep trying to learn over and over again.  It is so nicely demonstrated in the steady gaze of a bird over the water just waiting for a fish to swim by.  The statue stillness of a ground squirrel when it senses my presence just hoping to blend into the surroundings.  Since learning should never stop, I have r ecently been reminded of an additional lesson that I have seen over and over again in nature. Never Give Up This one seems especially important as 2020 draws to a close.  This has been a challenging year.  I have lost many friends and relatives this year and we have all generally been challenged with a new lifestyle of "normal".  This little grebe demonstrated the lesson of perseverance so clearly during a peaceful morning I spent visiting a local lake.  He flapped mightily to fly but never achieved flight.  Grebes are not generally known as

  There is no denying that the holidays this year are very different.  Holiday parties, rushing into stores, and a long line of gifts waiting to be wrapped wasn't something that was part of my holiday this year.  I am a rather extreme optimist and so I look toward the positives of this holiday.  I envisioned a very relaxed holiday with plenty of time to just enjoy the season.  Surprisingly this holiday didn't feel less busy and it sort of snuck up on me in a way that had me putting up my tree just a week and a half ago.  My escapes into nature were limited this month but I did carve out time early one morning to explore and was met with some rather grumpy characters who made me smile. This spoon-billed duck was full of determination and while I don't think that he was swimming directly at me to get me to move, he didn't seem thrilled that I was present or perhaps he just couldn't believe that it was morning already.  I backed up some but this serious and rather grum

  Birds can be very fast and they can also be great at hiding.  The Arizona desert experienced a rather cold, by our standards anyway, and breezy few days so I headed out with my camera to find a deserted patch of nature to explore.  Whether it was due to the cool weather or the wind, the birds seemed especially difficult to spot on this particular morning and provided me with a game of sorts and lots of smiles. This guy was hiding in a tree.  He was a rather large bird and the branch didn't seem to hold him as well as he would have liked.  His head swayed back and forth as he fought to keep his balance and each time his head came forward, it was rather like a game of peek-a-boo.  This little "game" didn't last very long as he completely lost his balance in a fluff of feathers and flapping and then circled back to land next to the water.   On I ventured and heard a good deal of noise in some reeds.  The noise ended up coming from sparrows who quickly decided to fly aw