A weekend overflowing

Lots of little things happened this past few days:

Let's start with Nellie. Nellie (our almost 9 year old Lab/Rott mix), gets horrible allergies this time of year, and with every passing summer, it gets worse. Time to see Dr. Kathi!


I love to see her in her official white coat.

Turns out our appointment was right after a Facebook friend's:

Mary Ann (That poor dope with no blog)


I've been trying forever to get a photo of the resident chipmunks who live at Lake Isabella and this one stopped just long enough (praying?) for me to capture him.



The other night, Geoff let Hooper outside around 3 am. He was unable to get Hooper to come back in, so Hooper slept under one of our maple trees until dawn.
And this was why he refused to come in:

He had treed a raccoon.
And the raccoon fell asleep in an old robin's nest.


I'm sure it wasn't a restful night for this teen-aged raccoon.

A praying mantis on the hummingbird feeder:

If this guy had been bigger (he was only about three inches long) I would be worried about our hummingbirds.

To cleanse your minds from that link, how about some Boston Terriers?

These guys visited my program today at Farbach-Werner Nature Preserve. The little one is really little (a"teacup" Boston) and the larger one was really large (about 40 pounds).

This is a red-morph screech owl who lives with the Hamilton County Parks:

And just a few months ago, he was one of the flurry of screech owls who would regularly land on me when I entered the screech owl mew to get Angel. All of the birds who now live at the Park once were birds being cared for by RAPTOR, Inc.

My favorite bird from the Parks:

This is Curly, an 8-year old Black Vulture. He is uninjured physically, but is a human imprint, so he is unable to be released.

A super fun bird...lots of personality:

He would rather be near his keepers than near other birds.


And he likes to sample the hair on their legs.