Drfredc

Our Parrot has manners, sort of... She bypasses 'please' for the alpha 'Thank You'.

An unsuccessful mating dance between two Blue Footed Boobies at Galapagos. Yes, the Blue Footed Boobies are a real bird... Video from our Feb 2022 Celebrity Flora Cruise.

One of my 35 weeks of off-trail adventuring in this backwoods Yosemite area. This 2001 trip was with my daughter and two of my DDS colleagues. The trip was in early August, which means lots of flowers, and bugs. A week or two later, it would have been just flowers and views... It's a base camp adventure, where we hike in and drop the packs at the camp and day hike the peaks and canyons every day until the food and adult beverages are used up. The mirror lake event is common to many mornings, if you get up early enough. I was there 3 times before I noticed it, my bad... Most of the lakes and mini-peaks in this area are actually unnamed, so we've been naming stuff mostly to make it easier to talk about where we are or are going -- Base camp "camp-leave-it-better-than-you-found-it" is such a place). These sorts of adventures require a certain amount of expertise in hiking and scrambling off trail -- not recommended for newbs without knowledgeable supervision. Yes, there's a 45 minute hi-res bluray version. Enjoy.

A 30 year old, ten plus foot tall, hedge of Rhodies surround a corner of our Puget Sound yard (40 miles from Seattle). The hedge is mature enough to basically take care of itself, no pruning, watering, or much of any effort other than setting it up to start with and babying it for a few early years.