Rusty's porcupine
Slow day; the only plan was to visit the museum. Saw swallows, probably Barn Swallows, staying within a couple of feet of the ground. This doesn't happen at home. Rained all night and in the morning the wind shifted to the north and turned fierce and icy.
Intermittent squalls keep coming through, mixed with intervals of very warm sunshine. So I went jogging, determined to do 30 minutes. I started out with a hoodie pulled tight around my face and a windbreaker zipped up to my chin. After ten minutes of jogging with a 20 mph ice-cold wind pushing me, the sun came out. I stripped off the windbreaker, then eventually the hoodie. After fighting them to stay tied around my waist for a while (note to self, put the windbreaker around my neck from now on), I finished the jog out on the road.
So when I finished the jog, which turned out to be 42 minutes with a couple minutes of stoppage to mess with the jackets, I tried to walk and look at birds. I could see a line of rain coming from the northwest. After a few minutes walking, I put the hoodie back on. And after it started spitting rain, the windbreaker.
Desert mountain weather is weird.
They call these mountains "sky islands" -- isolated mountain ranges in southeastern Arizona and northern Mexico. Some of the mountains rise more than 6,000 feet above the surrounding desert floor making the lowlands and high peaks drastically different. Plants and animals living in the mountains could never survive in the surrounding deserts.
Much more snow on the mountains this morning
We weren't able to (willing to) do much birding in the mountains this trip. It was just too cold and rainy. Damn. Plus, I'd pretty much have to leave Ed sitting and go off for a long walk to see anything. Birding takes a lot of time in the best of times, and there just weren't a lot of birds to make it worth my while. At one point he parked for me and he sat on a log overlooking the creek while I wandered around with Molly. I had a great time (him too) but didn't see much in the way of bird life. Much, aka, nothing.
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