Downtown is to the left of the scene captured (the buildings at the left edge of the photo obstruct the view of downtown).

Enjoy that fresh mountain air!

The ram on the left has an identification tag on his neck.

Here is a closer look.

I intended to figure this out by listening to goose audio clips, but luckily, I never did. I say luckily because that would have been a fruitless effort — they were not geese at all. I saw a short clip on the news yesterday about Sandhill Cranes and immediately recognized the sound.

The groups I had seen were far too high up for me to recognize they were not geese (if nothing else, the legs would have given it away). I had never seen in person or heard Sandhill Cranes before, but I doubt I will have any difficulty identifying their call in the future.

An audio clip of Sandhill Cranes in flight (plus a crow) is available here.

You can find plenty of pictures on the internet. A few short, interesting videos are available here and here.

I would stand under the tree for several minutes, and they would continue with their chatter. If I stayed for more than a few minutes, though, they would quiet down and watch me.

I did not know what they were at first, but ultimately decided that they appear to be falcons. I managed to capture some images of them. Unfortunately, given the conditions, the quality of the images is somewhat low. The birds do appear to be falcons, particularly American Kestrels.

As I approached, a pair of them starting going wild, which from experience, suggested the presence of a nest nearby. When I was a child, I discovered on a few occasions how aggressive killdeer parents can be if you end up too close to their nest, but was fortunate enough once to see a clutch of superbly-camouflaged killdeer eggs. On this day I simply continued on to the store, knowing that I probably would never locate the eggs, even if I wanted to.

After shopping, I headed home along the same route. As I began to descend a hill close to where I had seen the birds earlier, I saw a killdeer dart away from a bush below me. He or she started to make a lot of noise and feigning injury.

It is lucky she made such a racket, too. I was walking straight toward the nest, and without warning I may have inadvertently stepped on it. When I approached the bush she was near and the rock bed it was in, I took very cautious steps, just in case my suspicions were correct.

I was right to be careful, but I always assumed she was protecting eggs. It ended up that she was monitoring a nest of hatchlings, which, like the eggshells they had previously been encased in, had excellent camouflage.

Apparently, killdeer hatchlings are precocial, and so these chicks were naturally remaining silent and motionless when I was around. That in itself was interesting to see, but I also found myself wondering where the eggshells had gone. Did the parents move them away to decrease the liklihood of detection, did they move the chicks after hatching, or was it just the wind?

After looking at the chicks for a short period (I did not want to stay too long and create a greater disturbance than I already was), I continued toward home. About forty feet later, and now on a parking lot surface near a median with six inch tall bushes in it, I stopped to look back to remember the location of the nest. I stood there for possibly fifteen seconds when a bird launched out of the bushes, frightening me in the process. I turned around to see a female Mallard Duck fleeing from her hiding place because I had just happened to stop right there. Of course, she was hiding in the bushes with a bunch — eight, in total — of eggs underneath her.

High temperatures here are not really a problem, though. In the shade, even mid-ninety degree weather is not unbearable, but the sun here is quite intense. So when I noticed that the sky had become overcast during mid-morning today I was pleased because I knew the journey outside during lunch would be better than most days recently.

When I went outside during lunch, the sky was rumbling from high-altitude lightning. On the way back from lunch, I noticed a fire — presumably started by a lightning strike — on a nearby foothill. Green Mountain was burning for at least several hours and appears to have burned right up to some homes near its base.

The image was taken at around 7pm, and the flames appear to have died down, although the hills were still smoldering.