Thanks Sandrine. Unpacked into a larger work file in photoshop, I found the stuff at the right edge was in your file. At first I actually thought it was part of your plan. In the end, I decided to keep the added textures it gave my page. :p

We had taken photos of the hawk, then when I moved closer he decided to move to a different tree a little farther away from the road. We hadn't been seeing many hawks in quite a while. We knew eagles, hawks and owls had been killed by avian flu in record numbers in recent years.

On our second trip around the loop, we were delighted when a marsh wren paid no attention to us. He just kept singing after we stopped and even backed up a ways. We thought he had springtime and the work of finding his mate on his mind, as he sang as loudly as he could.

Thanks Sylvia for the challenge.

Mother's Day is certainly in May on the refuge. We saw quite a few families on the water, even on a windy morning. It seemed like the babies were more attached to one parent than the other, but we couldn't decide whether they stayed close to the mother or to the father.

A twist, but if you've got ducks and blackbirds in upside down umbrellas, it's got to be fantasy. Right? I think so. :p I got AFT's umbrella in early March, and have wanted to do something fun with it since that day.

On Monday it was "Red Flag Warning" windy with gusts 60-80 mph predicted, but at sunrise it was maybe 25 mph. We knew the little white birds were avocets, and I thought it likely the tiny white things around them must be their babies. We knew the camera would see them.

Inspired by the free gift in Jen's newsletter. She says it's OK if I share the link here.

I wanted to use the photo with the inspiration of diagonal lines, but when it came down to it, I couldn't use papers to tell the story better than the big photo did, so I went with it. The word art using alphas in the strip of course is inspired by the other page. :p

In April when we visited, they had just been burning 4,000 acres at Alamosa refuge a week before. It was all black and charred, and troubling. A month later, there was more flooding from the Rio Grande than we'd ever seen before and the scene had changed dramatically.

I've daydreamed for countless hours, about those flowers in the surreal place where they were thriving as the trees were dying from our raging beetle kill epidemic. Still don't know where it was.

We just stopped in the middle of a very narrow road, shady, with lots of tall pines on the slopes. There were the biggest masses of red Indian paintbrush flowers we'd ever seen, for a ways on both sides of the road. All I can remember, is it was somewhere in Wyoming's Snowy Range.

MAY 2024 Challenge Layouts Links: Challenge 1: Double Scraplift https://oscraps.com/community/media/1-coming-back-from-fire.392130/ Challenge 2: Creative Photo Treatments https://oscraps.com/community/media/2-go-with-all-your-heart.392206/ Challenge 3: Storybook/Fantasy...

Inspired by Jenn's Color Crush 73 (April ColorPlay) Boxes and Papers

Inspired by Jenn's Color Crush 73 (April ColorPlay) Papers, and ET's magnolias. we don't have them but I think maybe Alabama (where Jenn lives) probably has them.

You knew you'd have to wait while I took photos of the ice on the cherry blossoms that had just bloomed the afternoon before. I had a thing for ice crystals, no matter whether they were, on the river or on the flowers.

I knew that if a dictator took over our country, I'd be fairly high on the list of those to be punished. I had spoken out. And it wasn't until they passed a major aid bill for Ukraine and Israel, that we both started to relax. It was a sign that everything had shifted. We were going to be OK.

I support Ukraine, and leading up to this Earth Day I was distressed a bit about how things were going there as I worked on this piece. I started with the scorched earth feels. Then my mood and the words on my card changed as the earth shifted with new funding for Ukraine and Israel from the US.

We had buds on everything all at once and the flowering crab had just turned bright pink. And there were daffodils. I loved the spring snow that wasn't so bad but there were several gray snow days in a row. We were glad for a rest when everyone was coming down with colds.

With the last two solar eclipses, I was taken by the way leaves turned into little pinhole cameras and the sidewalk was so interesting. This one wasn't worth much bother, and it was hard for me to move. Inflammation beasts were awake in both my hips and shoulders from my new physical therapy.