Steve and Judy's Travels!

Saturday the wedding anniversary found us. No matter where we are each
year, it finds us. We keep track of the birds we see. We’re tracking
anniversaries as well. This one is number thirty-nine on the life list. Another walk on the beach. Dinner at Oceans of Seafood. A few more birds.
Saw the summer tanager and black throated blue warbler. Saw a louisiana
waterthrush out on the beach picking through the seaweed. Time to head north. The Santa Fe job rescheduled to Wednesday, Thursday,
and Friday of next week. We have to get there in time on Tuesday to meet
with another potential client.

Walking on the beach here is something like walking through a dry grass
field full of grasshoppers in August. A wave of motion precedes your path.
Here, it’s a wave of shorebirds. The ever-present and ever busy
sanderlings. Complaining willets, black bellied plovers, red knots,
turnstones, dunlins, the occasional piping plover, least sandpiper, and
semi-palmated sandpiper. Such a concentration of shorebirds. They flush
and swirl ahead of every step, just a little farther ahead than the
grasshoppers in the field do, and they don’t land on your legs. The
pelicans glide silently by. The laughing gulls, in full summer dress, are
anything but silent.

I’m still thinking about Moab. I told of our great adventure, driving on
the white rim road for a couple hours. Stephanie, from our office, is off
to run on it this weekend. There is an independent movie in the works. An
extreme running movie. It will track the progress of several runners
through a year of training and “ultra” runs. What a great thing for someone
else to do so we can watch how she does. Maybe I’ll give it a try….. in
my next life.

Saw the redstart again. This evening we saw the blackpoll again, and an
immature summer tanager. We saw a purple gallinule and eleven baby black
bellied whistling ducks, and some baby blue herons that all look like Don
King in the gum trees behind the pond. More black and white, magnolias,
chestnut sided, bay breasted, and yellowthroats.

We like his work.