Photographing with Hazel

What a beautiful morning! The tour de france was having a rest day, so Hazel and I headed over to the homestead trail for a nice hike. I decided to bring my large lens as I have seen many cool birds around here. It is a bit heavy for hiking but was well worth it as you will see.

We had barely hit the trail when I spotted quite a few of these birds. They are say's phoebes.

Seemed to be a family of them.

There's a beautiful old building at the beginning of the trail. Seems the birds figured out that earwigs live in the gutters. Yum!

looks like a youngster....

Next we came upon a family of magpies....

here is one of their kids....

Beautiful!

one of my favorites....a western tanager made a brief appearance!

it was a bit hazy and humid today

this is a spotted towhee. They are all over and finally this guy posed for me....

a blue gray gnatcatcher enjoying the day....

I am pretty sure this is a young blue grosbeak....... so beautiful!

This guy was singing away. It is a yellow breated chat......

and yeah, a cedar wax wing made an appearance too

We were almost back to the parking lot and I spot a family of cassin's kingbirds......

Hazel realized it was going to be awhile, so she found a shady spot to wait for me. Smart dog!

Well, Hazel did quite well with me stopping to photograph. So we will do this again very soon! Many places I go to are not dog friendly but the mesa trail with it's off shoot trails are. So we will be exploring those trails quite often!

thanks for reading!