October

 Upon reflecting on what we've been doing this month, I decided that I would show it in pictures...

As you can see, we've been spending all our free time taking pictures. Besides the Big Morongo trip, we haven't really gone anywhere. All these pictures are from the yard around our house and does not even show all the species of plants and animals we have viewed or taken pictures of here. They are merely some of my favorites from this past month.

We have set up a little watering hole/bird bath out front for the birds. I cleaned up the planter area next to our driveway a bit. I pulled out the weeds and put in some ground cover to try out. It is frustrating though because I can't seem to get rid of the bermuda grass that keeps invading and trying to take over the area. Hopefully the new ground cover will eventually help control that once it gets established but I will probably have to get a little more once I am sure that it just won't die on us. It seems to be holding up okay so far, although the snails did a number on one of them. We put in a little feeding station for ground feeders (birds) and some sticks that they might want to, hopefully, use to perch on. The other frustrating thing is the gophers that keep making tunnels through the area. Sometimes my watering wells will collapse because the tunnels are too close to the top soil in that area. Also, the roots of the bermuda grass seems to use it as a highway to re-spread back through the planting area. Every few days, you can see new grass coming up and you can dig it up and follow a line of roots following the tunnels. Christian has tried to set traps but they have thus far been able to circumvent them.

Christian has also been trying to tame the trees around the property, especially the pomegranate. We keep hacking it to bits in the hopes of getting rid of it once and for all, but by the time we fill up the green trash can and wait for it to be emptied and have time to continue our work, it has grown back by quite a bit. The upside is that I was still able to harvest enough pomegranates to make a batch of jelly this month. 

Christian is also putting in a hedge on the side of our house where the donkeys keep trying to sneak in. The originally lined our driveway with some fencing in order to keep them out but now they are going around the cars parked on the street, crossing the neighbors yard and stepping down into ours in order to reek havoc in our yard. Why?! All I know is that it keeps nearly destroying our dwarf orange tree. I don't think we've been able to get oranges for at least four years because of them. I thought we had our yard protected this time but it managed to get in several times now to poop in our yard, eat some grass and destroy my orange tree once again. We even put up some cinder blocks on the lowest part of the yard that we believe it has been crossing over to get in. It knocked it over once getting in and out of there still so Christian has put more blocks to raise it up some more to deter them. And now we have expensive baby shrubs that we are trying to raise up to be a nicer and more permanent solution, we have to reinforce the cinder blocks so that they don't know the cinder blocks over again and smash our baby shrubs.

Shortly after we did that, I went out one morning to water and found the donkeys in our driveway, munching on the Mexican feather grass on the side of the driveway that sticks out of the fence. I chased them away and found a lone donkey in our neighbors yard, looking in mournfully at our temporary, make-shift barricade that it hadn't found a way yet to circumvent. It eventually walked back out to the street to join the donkeys I chased away into one of the other neighbors yards which is more accessible to them.

Big Morongo Canyon Preserve

This month, Christian and I decided to check out the Big Morongo Canyon Preserve as it is not too far away and is supposed to be a popular migration stop for birds. It is on the way to Joshua Tree, but tucked away in the little town. When we arrived, we were a bit skeptical because there were quite a few cars in the parking lot and camp area.

As we walked in though, you can tell the place is kept fairly nice. The area was beautiful but we were still a little wary of what we would find going in as we heard a lot of noise of machinery or a loud vehicle in the distance. Christian got a neutral density polarizer for his camera and wanted to try it out for his videos.

They have a little nature center just inside of the preserve. There isn't a whole lot in the office but outside of it has an area set up to feed and attract the birds and animals. It was actually quite nice and inspired us to maybe incorporate a few things in our own yard. We immediately started spotting various birds in the surrounding area.

While we have taken pictures of various birds over the years, we are mainly just enthusiastic photographers, not birders so when some of the other birders there were asking us questions or talking amongst themselves, we had no idea what they were talking about for the most part. We are obviously aware of some of the popular birds we've run into over the years, we didn't know about some of the not so common birds that have not been so easy to spot while we were out hiking, like the Tanagers, Towhees or Thrashers. We know a quail when we see it but is it a Gambel's Quail or a California Quail?

I've been taking pictures of birds a lot lately. First, when I went out to the Bolsa Chica Ecological Preserve with Caitlyn this summer because she also loved to take pictures of birds. A few years ago, we attempted to take her to the Salton Sea for this purpose, but it was in the middle of summer and the water line was very low and was very disapppointed with what we found there. Once Christian got me my new insane zoom lens for my birthday, the excitement for bird photography was renewed and multiplied.

In an effort to learn more, we talked to the people at the nature center about whether they had a field guide for birds in our area. They did not really have anything that specifically targeted our area and they suggested an app called Merlin or eBird. Looking into all this made us fall into the rabbit hole of "birding." 

It was vey relaxing and even somewhat therapeutic to sit there watching the antics of the little birds around us. I was jealous that big groups of hummingbirds seem to be able to coexist together at the nature center. They didn't have any crazy, super territorial hummingbirds which guarded the feeder and chased all the rest away constantly like I have here at home.

However, there was a Cooper's Hawk that flew into the area every 20 or 30 minutes and all the little birds would scatter and hide. The second time that one flew in, we finally dragged ourselves away to explore more of the canyon trails.

A couple of the trails were closed off because of damage from heavy rainfall earlier this year but the trails are slated to be fixed by the end of the year. The canyon was fairly well maintained and kept pretty clean. When we got farther down the trails, it was pretty peaceful. We didn't have the whole place to ourselves or anything. People were still wandering about on the trails here and there but it wasn't too bad. It is definitely worth returning here. In fact, by the time we whipped back around to the nature center, we were already making plans to return in another month or so when the cottonwood trees changed into their fall colors!

And as we continue down the rabbit hole of birding, after all the new pictures of birds we've collected, we ended up starting a "life list" to help us keep track of what we've captured. We got a handful of "lifers" and our life list is steadily growing.