Birds, Bugs, Bobcats, and other Animals: Arizona

Dirk and I had a long visit with mom and Desi.  Mom sees bugs in the herbs in her food, the clips on paper, and the arrow on my computer screen.  Fortunately, she is blase about them.  Here we are comparing heights in the mirror.

These peach faced parrots have invaded Arizona and live in my mom's neighborhood now, although this shot was taken in downtown Scottsdale.

After our visit with mom we headed down to Tucson to visit my brother and his wife. They had a visitor in their yard, this beautiful bobcat!

Here it is in the dessert setting.  Later they had a much larger one:  the mother, they theorize.

Only my brother gets texts from his friends with pictures of dead raccoons.  This one had had its innerds eaten out, perhaps by a bobcat similar to above.  So we drove 20 minutes into the desert to retrieve its corpse from the friend's garbage can and cut off its tail. Now, how to skin it?????

Dirk and Rocky worked together dissecting away the skin and pulling the bones out of the tail, a process that took much longer than the cavalier instructions printed online.  End result, one coon skin tail stuffed with salt instead of bones, now curing in a ziploc in our RV!  Future plans for tail are unclear.  Hat, anyone?

Or perhaps a new pants ornament?

Dixie's sister-in-law, Mercy,  hiding like a bug in their native Mexican December blooming flowers!

One of the many bugs in Rocky's bug collection:  this is a mama scorpion with many babies and a few crickets.

To our great delight, scorpions glow green when illuminated with a black light.  Aren't they so cute????

Part of a gang of hawks in the Raptors in Flight show at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum.  I am glad not to be their prey because they hunt in teams.....this one a team of 6......and tag team each other in pursuit of rabbits and such.  Here they cruised over our head by inches as they sought out little tidbits of food left by their trainers!

Dixie living life as a desert tortoise at the Arizona Desert Museum in Tucson.

Our minimally telephoto cameras do not do this sight justice......huge flocks of sandhill cranes coming in for a landing in a shallow pond that now hosts over 20,000 of em each night. What a racket!  We were able to camp right by the pond and listen to the seagull/frog- like calls all evening.

The Sandhill Cranes congregating at Whitewater Draw outside of Tombstone Arizona.  They feed at surrounding corn fields during the day and come back here at night.  By the time I woke up in the morning, all 20,000 of them were gone!