Burrowing Owls

So I had a friend call and let me know that she saw some owls by her house and that I needed to come take some pictures.  Everyone had told her they were screech owls, but it turned out that they are the endangered burrowing owl.  There were two different owls where she took me.  The smaller one was a little shy.  He is the one in the first picture.  In this picture he is peeping out of the hole at me.  I was able to get one shot off before he hid back down in the hole.  The other owl just sat and posed for me the whole time.  After I got a few shots, we went around to the other side of the canal and they were both sitting together. This time the smaller one posed perfectly for me almost the whole time and the bigger one was the one continually looking around.  I guess the smaller one was finally okay with me. These guys stood about 7-10 inches tall.  They are not very big, but just the cutest guys ever.

Bees

So this blog is a little late going up.  I took these pictures last weekend.  I had just got back from picking up some eggs at Tonopah Rob's and while I was there we talked about how the bee population is going down.  Which is not good for him, since he needs them to help with growing his vegetables.  For those of you in the Phoenix area, you should check out Tonopah Rob's website.  He has the best vegetables around.  Anyway, when I got back home, I went over to my sage bush right by my driveway and saw about 7 or 8 bees flying around in and out of flowers.  They looked like kids in a candy store.  They would pop their bodies in one flower crawl back out and then into the next one within a couple of seconds. I hope when these lovely bees left my sage bush they took a journey on over to Rob's.  

Butterfly

So my Mom and I decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather this weekend and plant some plants that we have had for a couple of months. We went from summer to fall in one day, it was so great. The last bush that we had to plant was a butterfly bush. It was the next in line to be planted when I noticed a tiny little butterfly on it. Imagine that, a butterfly on a butterfly bush. Anyway, this little guy was a little smaller than the size of a dime, but had beautiful markings. So I decided we were going to take a break from planting. Here are a few shots of the little guy.