Local Observations – Nature Plus

Given the continuing Covid-19 pandemic, we’re grateful that it’s not mid-winter…gray, brown and cold.  Winter is coming soon enough and the pandemic will still be ongoing…but we should be a bit closer to getting the coronavirus under control.  We will be in the first 50% of the population to get the vaccine whenever it is approved and available!

In the meantime…late summer continues to provide some comforting local sightings and some changes too.

The yellow finches continue to feed on the cone flowers in our front yard.  The seeds will run out soon though…and they’ll flock back to our feeder off the back deck.

Young cardinals are much like some pre-teen humans…awkward looking as they transition between childhood and maturity!

These young robins don’t look quite as ‘unfinished’ as the cardinal did.  Here the robins were drinking and bathing in one of our boulder’s little water reservoirs…

It’s getting dark a lot sooner now as the sun heads further south toward the equator.  Fall is not far away.  Laurie caught this bit of sunset just after 8PM the other evening. 

Most azaleas produce their lovely blooms in early to late spring.  The good news is that some types of azaleas not only bloom in the spring but also again in mid to late summer!  Ours are going strong into the first couple weeks of September.

These re-blooming beauties are easy to care for and they don’t grown much over 2 – 3 feet tall.  They do well in USDA zones 6 – 9 in partial sun and they’re available in a variety of colors. 

This is a mystery plant as far as we’re concerned.  It came from a garden where the home owner wanted to plant other varieties so we had it planted in our yard.  We have no idea what the name is of this small delicate flowering bush.  Any ideas?

We have a couple of 'alleged' Little Gem Dwarf Magnolia trees in our front yard.  We were assured that they would grow to a height of 15 feet or so…but no one told the trees that they were that limited.  A little research reveals that they are more likely to reach heights of 20 to 25 feet.  They are both over 15 feet high and they’re only about 11 years old!

In any case, this interesting ‘cone’ shaped object is the ‘fruit’ of our magnolia trees.  It’s really a seed pod that as it dries out will open and release small bright red ‘football’ shaped seeds.    

This young male humming bird hangs out in one of our magnolia trees.  Its ‘lair’ is close to our hummingbird feeder.  Should another hummingbird dare to approach the feeder, this little fellow goes into full attack mode.  It’s his feeder, after all!

Looking out a window at the back of our house, I noticed these colorful fungi staring back at me.  It turns out that this was just one phase in the life of “Amanita jacksonii”, a mushroom that has a symbiotic relationship with pine and oak trees.  These beauties are located under our big oak tree and when you add a lot of moisture, as we’ve had this year, this is the result.  It is reported that this mushroom is edible…but we aren’t about to prove or disprove this claim.

Our neighbors Sherry and Mike are having a large deck built across the back of their home.  Solid footings weren’t found until the builder dug down 4 feet into the ground.  Jack, one of the guys building this deck, helped us out the other day when one of our sprinkler system zones decided to operate despite being turned off…much appreciated!

Things are changing fast in our neighborhood.  A little more than a block away from our house, one of our neighbors had their Labor Day family festivities ruined when a contractor's crew clear-cut the woods and bulldozed the lot right behind their home... Now we have 15 homes in various stages of construction within a quarter or perhaps up a half mile from our house.  

With all these new houses being built so close to our home, it’s always a pleasant surprise when we spot deer casually browsing as we drive by.  This doe and her half grown fawn…still with spots…were grabbing some lunch less than a block from our house...very close to where that newly clear-cut lot is now located.

Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them.

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Take Care, Big Daddy Dave 

Missing Family Visits…Looking forward to 2021!

Like many older folks with a higher risk of complications from Covid-19, we haven’t been able to hit the road to visit family nor have they been able to visit us.  Safety first…with the only visitors this year being Laurie’s sister, Bonnie and her husband Bill.  Kids can be ‘carriers’ while being asymptomatic so they present a real risk for older folks, especially since school has started up.

Nevertheless, we do miss all of our family!  What follows are some recent photos of our family that have been sent to us.  The kids are growing up, that’s for sure!

This is Laurie’s nephew Marc, his wife Tammy and their oldest daughter Abby.  Abby has just started her first year of college at the University of Missouri.  Marc is Laurie’s sister Karole’s son.  Marc and Tammy have 2 other daughters as well…Regan and Cate. 

This is Charley Kate!  She loves the camera.  She is one of Laurie’s great nieces.  She is Laurie’s sister Bonnie’s granddaughter.  Bonnie’s daughter Kasey is Charley Kate’s mom. 

This is one of Laurie’s great nephews.  Collin is a baseball standout!  He’s accompanied by Charlie Kate at the right of the photo with her sister Elliot Jane at the left.  Elliot Jane is obviously star struck!  Collin is one of Laurie’s sister Bonnie’s grandsons.  The other one is Keaton.  Bonnie’s son Kyle is both boy’s dad.

Charley Kate sure gets into a lot of photos!  She’s taken up hockey and she is excelling in the sport… In the second photo, she's with her dad, Kevin.

This is Elliot Jane and she looks very happy.  She was at her grandma Bonnie’s house and she’d just been shown these dolls that she and Charley Kate can play with whenever they visit.  The dolls and doll clothes were my mother’s and she’d made all those outfits…one of her many creative phases.  Since Laurie and I don’t have any granddaughters, we thought that this was a fitting home for the dolls.  They have joined a miniature tea set that we’d passed down to Bonnie from my grandmother’s belongings.

Both of these young ladies are Bonnie and Bill’s grandchildren too.  They are Kasey’s daughter’s Avery and Delaney.

Elliott Jane and Charley Kate were excited and ready to go to school.  Love the uniforms and that sign…

These are all of Kasey’s girls…and all of Bonnie’s granddaughters.  Avery is holding Elliot Jane and Charley Kate is standing next to Delaney.  There were photos of all of them in masks in preparation for school and that is important but these photos are more enjoyable.

Laurie’s sisters and their extended families all live in the St. Louis Missouri metropolitan area… We will be St. Louis bound as soon as possible! 

Now for one of our grandsons… The redhead in this group photo with the Track and Field t-shirt is our grandson Emmett Lee.  This summer, he and the rest of this group had volunteered to coach elementary school kids who were interested in track and field.  Emmett was bummed out that all of his sports were cancelled this year…but at least he was able to get out there and help others.

This is a recent photo of Emmett on the deck of the family’s home in Omaha.  He is tall and lean!  This fall he’s a junior in high school and he’ll be 17 in November. 

I’ll end this family photo session with a couple of selfies that were sent to us from New York City.  David III is a sophomore this fall as New York University.  Unfortunately, both school and the city are greatly changed from the first part of his freshman year.  He’ll make the best of it though just because that’s the way he looks at things.  He had to check into his apartment 14 days prior to classes starting.  Coming from a state that New York had labeled as a coronavirus hot spot, he had to go into quarantine.  Facetime, video games, meals delivered…and boredom!  He took the first photo as soon as he was ‘free’ to leave solitary confinement.  The second one shows the view from his apartment.  I was impressed that I had to actually ask him to take a photo for us without a mask… He’s following the rules!

We miss our grandsons…as well as their parents, Amy and David II.  We hope to see everyone by mid-2021!  Waiting for a vaccine…

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Stay Safe and Take Care, Big Daddy Dave

When We Could Travel (VI)

...continuing to relive our 2006 trip to New Mexico, Arizona and southwestern Colorado.  In this post, we’d returned to New Mexico and were staying in the Santa Fe area.

This is the Cathedral of Saint Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe.  This is the mother church of the Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe.  It was built between 1869 and 1886 on the site of an older adobe church which was built in the early 1700s.  A small chapel from the old church is still in place on one side of the cathedral.

Having been designed in the Romanesque Revival style, this structure is a dramatic contrast to the surrounding adobe building in downtown Santa Fe.  The Cathedral was officially elevated to a basilica by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, when it was officially named the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi.

The La Fonda Hotel is the only hotel located on the Historic Santa Fe Plaza in the center of the city.  The photo shows the La Plazuela Dining Room in the hotel.  It was built in the 1920s and it is filled with foliage, colorful furnishings and it’s encircled with hand-painted windows in the southwest style.

Records indicate that La Fonda occupies the site of the town’s first inn which was established when the city was founded by Spaniards in 1607.  La Fonda’s history can be traced back 400 years.  Throughout the 1800s, La Fonda was the premier lodging option for trappers, soldiers, gold seekers, gamblers and politicians. 

The hotel changed hands several times over the years and in 1925 it was purchased by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway.  It was leased to Fred Harvey who made the inn a Harvey House.  That hotel chain was known for its high standards, fine dining and for its signature “Harvey Girls”, a staff of exceptionally well-trained waitresses.

Today this premier hotel is a member of Historic Hotels of America.  You can find out more about La Fonda at https://www.lafondasantafe.com/.  To view the hotels that are listed with Historic Hotels of America, just go to https://www.historichotels.org/us/. 

While in Santa Fe, we decided that we should check out Museum Hill…a grouping of specialized museums all grouped together.

At the corner of the Old Santa Fe Trail and Camino Lejo, we were greeted by an impressive larger than life bronze sculpture.  It depicts the first wagon of a mule-drawn wagon train, struggling to make it up a hill.  This expansive scenario includes a muleskinner sitting on one mule while reaching down to help another mule that’s losing its footing.  All 6 animals are working hard to complete the climb.  A rider on horseback looks back.  Spectators include a Pueblo woman wrapped in a blanket and a young boy with his dog.  The artist who created this scene was Reynalda Rivera.  His work was dedicated in 2003.

The Santa Fe Trail was a land route opened by the Spaniards at the end of the 1700s.  During the 1800s the trail connected New Mexico with Missouri and St. Louis with its port on the Mississippi River.  The trail passed through Comanche territory and they demanded payment for safe passage.  Of course American traders viewed the Comanche as another market.  In 1846, the US Army used the Santa Fe Trail to invade New Mexico during the Mexican-American War.  The arrival of the railroad at Santa Fe in 1880 spelled the end of the trail’s importance. 

These photos show portions of the collection of Museums on Museum Hill.  The complex includes the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, Museum of International Folk Art, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.  It also features the Santa Fe Botanical Garden. 

The Museum of Spanish Colonial Art opened in July of 2002.  With over 3,700 unique objects in the collection, it is the only museum in the world that is dedicated to Spanish colonial art.

Our visit was long before I started blogging and I wasn’t taking photos in the museums we visited.  We certainly enjoyed the experience but you’ll have to visit these museums yourself to see what they offer.  Some glimpses of the collections can be found on line at the various websites.  They are as follows:

https://www.spanishcolonial.org/, http://www.internationalfolkart.org/.  http://www.indianartsandculture.org/, https://wheelwright.org/, and https://santafebotanicalgarden.org/.

This 24 foot tall bronze sculpture is also found on Museum Hill.  This impressive creation was sculpted by San Carlos Apache artist Dan Goseyun and its entitled Apache Mountain Spirit Dancer.  The figure itself is over 10 feet tall.  He looks like he’s in perpetual motion…

The Apache Mountain Spirits are very important to the tribe’s culture.  These spirits are the agents of the Supreme Being and they provide protection from disease and enemies.  Spirit Dancers are crowned with wooden-slat headdresses and they’re armed with wooden swords and a bullroarer.  They dance at night to the sounds of drums, singing and the whirling bullroarers.

The San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation was established in 1872 as a reservation for the Chiricahua Apaches as well as the surrounding Yavapai and other Apache bands that were forcibly removed from their homelands.  Living conditions were horrendous at the time. The reservation includes 1.8 million acres of desert, alpine meadows and Ponderosa Pine forest in southeastern Arizona.  Today the San Carlos Apaches have their own Chamber of Commerce, two casinos, a language preservation program, a culture center and a tribal college.  Over 10,000 Native Americans live on the reservation today…

This was The Bobcat Bite, a restaurant that was located on the outskirts of Santa Fe, off the Old Las Vegas Highway.  The building was originally a trading post.  Then it was a gun shop for a while.  Finally, it was converted into a restaurant… The Bobcat Bite won many awards and was featured in newspapers and television as the place to go for a green chile cheeseburger.

The restaurant was named for the bobcats who would come down from the nearby foothills to snack on fresh scraps of meat offered by ‘bobcat friendly’ diners.  I don’t know how I discovered Bobcat Bite.  It was featured in the Chicago Tribune, it appeared in the 2004 documentary Hamburger America, and it appeared on Food Network shows hosted by Alton Brown and Andrew Zimmer…the latter of which rated it in his top 3 hamburgers!

GQ Magazine listed Bobcat Bite’s green chile cheeseburger as one of “The 20 hamburgers You Must Eat Before You Die”.  Unfortunately I didn’t take food photos back in 2006 so you’ll have just gaze on a photo I borrowed from the Internet.  This burger was indeed excellent!  Sadly, the restaurant’s owners retired in June of 2013 and the restaurant was closed.

Just a little wildlife… This is a colorful evening grosbeak, a member of the finch family.  It breeds in coniferous and mixed forest across Canada and the western mountainous areas of the USA and Mexico.  Its wintering range stretches across the northern USA to New England and Pennsylvania.  Its conservation status is listed as vulnerable… 

We’re both always open for a little more back road exploration if the time allows.  So we took a drive from Santa Fe to Las Vegas…New Mexico.  In the 1880s, this Las Vegas was the big town in New Mexico Territory.  It was bigger and richer than either Santa Fe or Albuquerque.  The town is the county seat of San Miquel County and it has a population of about 13,000. It was established in 1835 after a group of settlers received a land grant from the Mexican government.  The town soon prospered as a stop on the Santa Fe Trail.  During the Mexican-American War Stephen W. Kearny made a speech here claiming New Mexico for the USA.

The railroad arrived here in 1879 and the town boomed.  It even had an electric street railway!  However the railroad also brought murderers, robbers, thieves, gamblers, gunmen and other undesirables, turning the east side of town into a den of sin and lawlessness.  Doc Holiday, Big Nose Kate, Jesse James, Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp were among those who came to town.  Today, Las Vegas New Mexico has almost 1,000 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Plaza Hotel (pictured above) opened in 1882 as the “Belle of the Southwest”.  It overlooks the Old Town Plaza Park.  Then and now, everyone stayed here, from Doc Holiday to Tommy Lee Jones.  The hotel has been featured in movies and TV from Tom Mix silent pictures to Longmire, Easy Rider and No Country for Old Men.  The adjacent building, constructed in 1891 was added to the Plaza Hotel in 2006.

To learn about the Plaza Hotel, its rooms, dining opportunities and more, just go to http://www.plazahotellvnm.com/.

However, I’d already booked a place for us to stay near Santa Fe.  For once I acceded to Laurie’s requests.  She loves Bed and Breakfast establishments…me not so much.  This is the courtyard of the Bobcat Inn Lodge.  It was built in the 1950s as a private residence.  Renovations and updates had been done in 2002 and our stay here was delightful.  Since we stayed here in 2006, additional renovations and upgrades were made in 2008, 2016 and 2017.   

Each room at the Bobcat Inn is themed with different settings that are relevant to New Mexico culture.  There are only 5 guest rooms, each with in-suite bathrooms.  Each room has a nice view of the mountains.  As you can see, our room had this great southwestern style fireplace as a focal point…

The Bobcat Inn is situated on 10 acres.  As you can see the views were spectacular and I’m sure they still are.  The patio with its southwestern plantings amplified the feeling for us…  Although the Inn is only 12 minutes from historic Santa Fe Plaza, this peaceful oasis provides amazing views of the nearby Sangre de Cristo and Ortiz Mountains.

The Bobcat Inn is located at 442 Old Las Vegas Highway in Santa Fe New Mexico.  Phone: 505-988-9239.  Website: https://www.bobcatinn.com/.

Next stop…on to Taos New Mexico.

Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them.

Thanks for stopping by for a trip down our road trip memory lane!

Stay Safe and Take Care, Big Daddy Dave

Wishful Thinking – Travel and Family

There is no doubt what Laurie and I would like to be doing this September…but Covid-19 has changed our normal September routine for the year.  We’d love to  head out on a road trip and tie the trip to family visits along the way.  Colorado and Utah had been our goal but that will have to wait until sometime in 2021. 

In lieu of the real thing, we’ll just have to imagine that we’re spending time with our family from Omaha.  I’m using their smartly planned early summer family trip to South Dakota for our virtual adventure. 

Love this photo of grandsons David III and Emmett Lee in the wilds of South Dakota...but I do have a question for David III.  In all the photos from this trip when he's posing with Emmett Lee, why were David's eyes closed!?

Credit for all of these photos goes to Amy, our daughter-in-law and mother of our 2 terrific grandsons… Kudos to David II for his great trip plan!

I’d used a few photos from the family trip before, showing the cabin where they stayed in Custer State Park…and the buffalo that were literally on their doorstep.  In addition to the state park, they also visited Mount Rushmore.  We can imagine their trip since Laurie and I have spent time in both areas.

Laurie and I love wildlife and Custer State Park is loaded with a variety of critters… The first photo is of a female Rocky Mountain Big Horn Sheep and of course the second picture features a more than cute baby… The sheep in western South Dakota are the easternmost examples of these animals in the wild. 

Two hundred years ago, it is estimated that there were as many as 200,000 big horn sheep in the western USA.  Their numbers sharply declined until the mid-1930s when the Boy Scouts of America and other entities started efforts to preserve and expand the herds.  At this point, the conservation status of these attractive wild sheep is listed as being of ‘Least Concern’. 

Cute little rodents aren’t they?  Prairie dogs are named for their habitat and warning call…which is similar to a dog’s bark.  These highly social animals live in large colonies and collections of prairie dog families can span hundreds of acres.  Members of a family group inhabit the same territory and they are referred to as ‘coteries’. 

Ecologists consider prairie dogs to be a keystone species.  They are the primary diet for black-footed ferrets, the swift fox, golden eagle, red tailed hawks, badgers, coyotes and the ferruginous hawk.  Golden-mantled ground squirrels, mountain plovers and burrowing owls rely on prairie dog burrows for nesting areas.  Bison, pronghorn and mule deer favor grazing on the same land used by these rodents. It should be noted that the removal of prairie dogs causes the spread of brush which prevents the growth of grasses and damages grazing lands for livestock.

Nevertheless, prairie dogs are frequently thought of as pests and they’re exterminated from agricultural lands to prevent crop damage.  Expanding human populations have also reduced their numbers.  For many years, it was thought that horses were often injured by stepping in holes and tunnels dug by prairie dogs.  This myth has since been disproven…

Amy also captured this photo of a female mule deer.  These deer are indigenous to western North America and they are named for their ears…which are large like those of a mule.

Mule deer are only found on the western portion of the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the American southwest as well as along the West Coast of North America.  White-tail deer, which populate the Eastern United States can also be found around western South Dakota…overlapping the range of the mule deer.  The most noticeable differences between white-tailed and mule deer are ear size, tail color and antler configuration.  Mule deer also tend to be larger.

Sweet!  Wait a minute!  Isn’t this a baby burro?  Yes it is!  A small herd of burros have roamed Custer State Park for almost a century.  They were originally used as pack animals for visitors to the park.  When the trips using burros ended, the working burros (donkeys) were released into the wild and they’ve roamed the park ever since.  FYI, a burro is a donkey but it’s referred to as a burro when it’s feral…roaming wild. 

The little herd of burros is commonly seen along the park’s 18-mile wildlife loop.  They are uncommonly friendly and they’ve learned to beg.  They are very popular with tourists.  Given the risks posed by automobiles, predators and rattlesnakes, the little herd is fairly stable…at around 15 animals.  Perhaps it’s now at 16 with this latest addition to the family!

This is a Pronghorn, an even-toed hoofed mammal that is indigenous to western and central North America stretching from Canada down into Mexico.  It looks like an antelope but instead, it is the only surviving member of its own family ‘Antilocapridae’.  

Prior to the arrival of the Europeans, the pronghorn was very abundant in the region of the Plains Indians and the area occupied by the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Plateau.  It was hunted as a principal food source and it also featured prominently in Native American mythology and oral history.

The pronghorn is the fastest land mammal in the Western Hemisphere.  It can run at 35 miles per hour for 4 miles, 42 miles per hour for 1 mile and 55 miles per hours for a half mile.  It is the second fastest land animal in the world, second only to the African cheetah…but it can sustain high speeds far longer than cheetahs.  Evolutionary experts have suggested that the pronghorn developed this speed due to an evolutionary need to escape from now-extinct predators such as the American Cheetah.  The pronghorn’s speed greatly exceeds any existing North American predators. 

How cute!  This newly born buffalo/bison calf was being encouraged by his mom to get its footing…  The ability to run is critical to its survival in these parts as coyotes and cougars roam the region looking for easy prey. 

FYI, other notable mammals inhabiting Custer State Park include elk, river otters and mountain goats along with aforementioned mule deer, white deer, Rocky Mountain sheep, prairie dogs and pronghorns. 

Why not scratch against a nice boulder or a big tree?  When you weigh more than a ton and you’re as big as this bison bull is, you can scratch on pretty much whatever and wherever you want!  He really seemed to be enjoying that nice picnic table…

Custer State Park is home to as many as 1,500 free roaming bison/American buffalo.  There are so many bison living here that the park has an annual roundup and auction each September.  Up to 1,000 of the bison are rounded up and several hundred are sold at auction.  This is done to ensure that the remaining rangeland can support the remaining animals.  As many as 10,000 people attend these events…

The American bison or buffalo once roamed North American in huge herds.  They ranged from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico and east to the Atlantic seaboard…as far north as New York and as far south as Georgia.  There were so many bison in North America that the trails or traces they hammered out over the centuries were followed by both Native Americans and pioneers.  A well-known example is the Cumberland Gap through the Blue Ridge Mountains to upper Kentucky. 

In the late 1700s, there were more than 60,000,000 bison in North America.  Through hunting and introduced diseases from domestic cattle, the herds were decimated.  In roughly 100 years, (1889), the species was down to just 541 animals.  Today, thanks to ongoing preservation efforts there are approximately 31,000 wild bison across the continent. 

Just a couple more photos…

This is our soon to be 17 year old grandson Emmett Lee.  He looks great posing on that boulder with the lake behind him!  His big disappointment this year are the limits on sports.  He loves basketball, track and football.  He’s a junior in high school this fall and he’s still growing…

David III is our oldest grandson.  He loves the camera… David will be 20 this December and he just started his sophomore year at New York University in Manhattan.  It will be a strange school year with a lot of virtual learning, social distancing and masks.  He started out by being quarantined in his room/apartment for 10 days as Nebraska was deemed a high risk state by New York authorities.

That’s about it for now!  We enjoyed seeing the wildlife at Custer State Park as well as our ‘virtual’ visit with our grandsons.  We hope to be back on the road by the middle of 2021…

Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them…

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Stay Safe and Take Care, Big Daddy Dave