Thursday, January 12, 2012 (Usery Mountain Regional Park, Mesa, AZ)

We have reached a milestone today...after almost 18 months on the road, enjoying and documenting our new lifestyle...our blog has hit 10,000 pageviews!  Although only 8 “followers” have identified themselves, we know that many others are reading and following our travels.  We would love to know who you are, so if you would like to identify yourself as a “follower”, just click the icon (“Follow”) on the top left-hand corner on the blog page.

Unfortunately it turned out to be a bad day weather-wise for our bird watch hike.  It was cloudy and windy...not conducive to good bird watching.  But the birds in our campsite sure liked the birdseed Steve put out for him. These colourful birds are Peach-faced Lovebirds.  We found out later that they are not native to this area...and are considered an "invasive species"...

We arrived at the trailhead just before 10:00 where quite a large group was assembling for the bird watching hike.  After greeting everyone, the hike leader explained that it’s going to be difficult finding the birds today...because it is cloudy, they tend not to fly around much because they cannot see shadows...this is one way that they are able to see their predators.  Their thin feathers also keep them hunkered down in the bushes out of the cold wind.

We started out on the ‘No-So Trail’ and she was right...there were no birds flitting around.  But we stopped many times and she explained a lot about the vegetation in the area.  Although we didn’t see many birds, we sure learned a lot about the different types of cactus and other desert plants.

Notice the wave-effect of the ground vegetation?  Apparently that is from the wind blowing seeds across the ground and then with the rain in December, they sprouted...

Binoculars up...

Superstition Mountains...

And we did see some birds (can`t remember what they are)....

After a 2 ½ hour saunter on the trails...going about 3 ¼ miles...we were back at the parking lot.  As the hike was ending and the leader, Sandy, was apologizing for the lack of bird sightings, a bald eagle was spotted soaring above us...a good way to end our hike.

Back home, we had lunch and then Steve got everything ready for our quad ride tomorrow while I went online to check email and then chatted with Chris on MSN...I had to give him a bad time about his recent hair cut (he got totally shaved!).  After Steve was finished, we thought we would take a walk up to the Nature Centre since we hadn’t had time to look around yesterday. 

Lots of different birds are around our campsite...

When we got back to the trailer, I decided to bake more of the flax seed cookies that I had baked last week...I had all of the proper ingredients this time!  Steve decided to take a nap in his chair outside.  The sun had been peaking through a light cloud covering but as the clouds got thicker, he came inside...just getting a little too chilly out there.

Tomorrow we are going to Bulldog Canyon for some ATV riding...really looking forward to it!