The mallards left the water and were out of view, as soon as they saw me. We watched the line of geese, and I loved seeing them swimming past the hardstem bulrushes, a wetlands favorite of mine. On the trip back to the hotel, I became a huge fan of the Rocky Mountain beeplant.

On Monday you didn't get much sleep and we almost didn't go to the refuge. You got ready anyway, and we stopped about ten minutes away when the sun came up in a clear blue sky. There were very few birds but I liked tracking the juvenile coot. I may have watched him catch a fish.

Photos from July 4th 10a - 11p When they saw we were home again, and there were treats.

It's a Jeep! Of course we put up with the ride and the road noise, and are fiercely proud of everything about it. Even its mileage. We took it in for a cylinder misfire and the shop people suggested it was time to fix the steering, which we never noticed was anything less than perfection.

Love it! The AI people call me the queen of the trail because I go through thousands of shots every day now, and I also turned one into a dashcam. Of course I'd love to see what you come up with! ;-)

I left old dirty trail camera on duty at the feeder, while I put the new one on the dash of the Jeep. What stood out in almost 10,000 photos with no food, I was watching wildlife in full foraging mode. Raccoons came before it got dark at night and in the morning again after daylight.

A floodgate had been opened, and all of that water had flowed in within less than 24 hours. Could they have drained and let the lake get parched to kill some unwelcome mollusks? It would probably never be in the news. People who manage the refuge quietly worked behind the scene.

The queen was on the street in a winter sweater, though it was over 100 degrees. She kept her house cold to sleep better and didn’t bother to change for a short walk. She welcomed a break from thousands of daily photos, though the birds and furry critters were too stressed to visit.

It was a hazy sunrise on Wednesday. Along the canal, I found the cutest baby yellow-headed blackbird. There were a few birds in the shallow water of the large lake, far out and standing ankle-deep. It looked to us like the water was leaving, and we wondered what might follow.

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.