Inspired by Jenn's new flairs.

On the last day of our July trip to MVNWR, we got the happy surprise at the south end of the refuge just as we were leaving. There was more water than an overnight rain could have explained. We had already had a great morning, so this was on top of the other rewards of being there.

I was inspired to try Jenn's new White Space Cards #1 when laying out my photos that day. It was fun!

We were shocked and amazed to find that all of water on the south end of the refuge was gone, and had disappeared in the past few weeks. To remember it, I took some photos, then went back to March and April and found a few photos of the area when it was full of sandhill cranes.

On Tuesday I saw the bunch of blackbirds and wondered if they’d stay. I started walking toward them, stopping every ten steps, taking another shot in case they’d fly. I went until two flew away. Then I took a photo of the little one with two dragonflies, proudly showing off his catch.

On our Sunday morning stop at the Alamosa refuge, there was plenty of water and it was easy to tell which areas had suffered more moderate drought and which had been in severe drought and still just couldn't .come back. Most of all, I enjoyed the milkweed flowers and insects.

From my daily notebook, a few selected photos from 3,741 for the day last Tuesday.

The beautiful spring was suddenly over and summer blasted its way in with the temperature at 99 degrees. Jenn and I traded photos of her darker and my lighter colored baby bunnies. There just might be nothing cuter than that one baby bunny fully stretched out in the shade.

The towhee is the size of a sparrow but has the presence of a blue jay, and I never knew we had them because I couldn't see them a year ago. And now they have become my favorite of all our birds, after I watched the blue jay kick the bunny to get him to leave the food dish.

One of the best surprises for me that the garden camera brought, was thousands of daily videos of clematis flowers throughout the day, some backlit swaying in a spring breeze. And when I hacked the registry on my Windows laptop, I loved that my AI guru called it "outlaw-style."

It was much later, when I studied my photos more closely, that I found the porcupine in a sunrise photo. He was just east of the little lake and the camera overexposed the photo. It was a lucky accident that I caught him out in the open during a sunrise — they’re not usually out so early.

I studied this same kind of hawk moth when it died on our sidewalk, I'd seen the catepillars, and had even taken photos of one sipping nectar from a flower. But it was a new thing for me, to see what first seemed to fly like a hummingbird and look a lot like a giant wasp, in a video.

On Wednesday we saw two avocets on nests and a few others in water. On Thursday we expected to see the nests and they were gone, and only a few avocets at the other end of the island. The cover was completely cleared from the island, and it seemed the birds were no longer safe.

GardePro took an interesting sunrise photo, and you used your V2's in a pinch. The cloudy sunrise was short as the sun climbed right away into clouds. There was no golden hour, just a gray day. There weren't many birds, none of quite a few of the ones we had expected to see.

I got the dashcam wired to the Jeep's 12-volt power and it was doing a great job of paying attention to the big picture. I kept thinking about the cowbirds we saw the day before, and we saw the usual ducks. I hoped to see the new ones that were too far away to identify, on another day.

While I was waiting for the wi-fi signal to my trail camera at 5 am, I watched a very tiny spider on the clematis, but by the time I was finished with the camera app and could take a photo, he was gone. I liked the colors and felt very fortunate to have one of the newest phone cameras out there.

The same spring storm pattern at Monte Vista on Tuesday, but the cloud cover was heavier and it stayed dark a lot longer. We saw hints of sunrise colors and blue sky to the north. After a while it got brighter and the sun did finally light up the snow covered mountains to the west.

The Bobolink — still rare at Alamosa — was there again a month later. Maybe he was a pioneer, trying out new territory as so much of their native habitat disappears. I thought I heard a bittern, but not the frogs that were calling back in May. I heard songbirds, and it was peaceful.

At the start of the Alamosa refuge tour it was lush, but going just a bit farther, the dry brown landscape hadn't changed in a month. We had hope, but the spring rains just couldn't make up for long term dryness, and the drought was reclassified in the "moderate to severe" category.

On Friday going home, we got to see our first sunrise all week, while heading east and straight into it. Then over a few hours we watched the clouds take over and drove the last leg of our trip in rain. We had a long stretch of unsettled spring weather, and we welcomed the moisture.