A pleasant evening's walk in Paradise...

A pleasant evening's walk in Paradise...  Miki, Race, and I took a slightly different route tonight than our usual two mile (round trip) walk.  We probably did three miles all together, including a mile or so around a field on some tracks we'd never been on before.  I noticed that the aromas from the alfalfa and barley fields had a distinctly “cooked” aspect to them, which I suspect is closely related to the (wonderful!) aroma of drying hay.

On the way up the first hill, still on our usual route, we came across a large flock (perhaps 100 birds) of white-faced ibis right in the road and not near any water.  We'd never seen them on dry ground before.  They held their place until we got roughly 50' away, then a lunge by Miki spooked them and the whole flock was gone.  They stayed in a single flock and made a long, slow loop around the entire field, traveling about 2 miles in the air, then settled back down on the same road, but behind us :)

Some photos from along the way below.  The horses in the first photo belong to our neighbors Gary and Elaine S.  Debbie says they are Paso Finos.  In the third photo, if you click to embiggen it, you can see the Hyrum Reservoir (about 3 miles north of our house) roughly in the center, below and left of a distant peak.