Staying Local

   Usually I need to drive at least 45 minutes to get to the places I enjoying photographing. And that's fine, but once in awhile it's a nice luxury to stay close to home. Lucky for me, I live in beautiful Boulder, Colorado. We have lots of open space so wildlife is abundant close to home. So today I headed over to Sawmill ponds and Walden ponds. It's about a 10 minute drive at most...sweet!

I started at Sawmill because I wanted to check on the osprey family. The nest is pretty far away for a good pic but I was hopeful of scoring an osprey catching a fish at one of the ponds. The light was just coming up through the clouds when I got to the nest. Was difficult to tell but I think this is one parent and one of their kids.

After watching the osprey, I continued down the trail and came face to face with this mule deer. She checked me out, had a bite to eat and headed into the thick brush.....

I heard a great horned owl hooting in the distance, so I headed towards the hoots. It was hard to tell if the GHO was close by or far away. So I decided it was worth a shot at hiking towards it. Along the way I spotted the other osprey parent perched in a tree. 

After following the hooting for a few minutes, I could tell the GHO was pretty far away and probably on the private property that is next to Walden ponds. So I headed back to the car and drove over to the Walden ponds parking lot. 

It was pretty quiet but finally I heard a beautiful song that belonged to this guy. It's a yellow warbler and he looks like a youngster as he's not as brightly colored as a mature male.

Flowers were everywhere!

Was very quiet so I decided to head back to the parking lot. Ha! Just as I was resigned to not seeing much today, I spotted this guy in a small tree. Sweet! It's a loggerhead shrike. I've seen them before but it's been a few years for me. So it was a nice treat! These are tough little birds! They eat insects, small birds and lizards. The insects get eaten immediately but since they do not have talons, larger prey often gets skewered on sticks or barbed wire before eating........ouch!

A dragonfly posed nicely for me......

They have a nice sign which shows all the ponds.....

After enjoying Walden ponds, I headed over to see my owl friends. As I turned onto 63rd St, I spotted a red tailed hawk in the field. He took off just as I focused in. But it does show why they are called red tails,huh?

Got to Twin Lakes and headed down the trail that the nest is on. I had just walked past the dead tree and I spotted a GHO. I expected it to be one of the youngsters but it was Sonny!
For those of you new to my blog, he's the dad of the youngsters.

I decided to walk around to the trail south of the east lake to see if I could spot the youngsters and bam! There was one of them!

He flew a short distance to this spot......

As I was walking around looking at different angles to get pics, I finally spotted one of the other youngsters tucked behind a tree. They did have 3 owlets this year but I never spotted the third one. 

Well that was sweet to see my owl friends. Usually by this time of the year, the youngsters are hanging out on the north side of the lakes. There's large trees and a large field for them to learn how to hunt. But they seem to be happy hanging out on the "island" which makes it easy to spot them.

I could have stood there and hung out with the owls all day. But it was Hazel time, so I headed home to pick up the Hazel dog!

Thanks for reading!