I blinked ... and all of a sudden it's Saturday!
Yesterday afternoon was beautiful here, and we took a nice drive up Blacksmith Fork Canyon in the hopes of seeing some of the wildlife that spring should bring us. We were quickly rewarded with a great viewing of an osprey, recently returned to the man-made pond just above the Hyrum City power generator. Not only did we see the osprey, we saw it tussling with a juvenile bald eagle – and then got to watch the eagle for awhile.
A bit later on our drive, Debbie spotted our first banded kingfisher of the year. Soon we'll be seeing these all up-and-down the streams and rivers here. On our last drive out, a few days ago, I had a brief sighting of the American dipper (one of my favorite little birds). Didn't see any yesterday, though. I saw a male Bullock's oriole resting in some wild roses, looking very bedraggled – I suspect he'd only just arrived. We spotted a single Sandhill crane, with a much-darker-than-usual body coloring – we're thinking it might have been a yearling. We saw swallows high above us, the first sighting of them this year (and I saw a single purple martin in our yard yesterday – most likely a scout). Then there were the deer: lots of deer. No elk, though...
All this gave me my first real opportunity to try out our new binoculars, and these live up to their promises. Despite being purely mechanical (and no batteries!), the stabilization mechanism does a great job of taking out the jitters. They gave me 20x magnification, hand-held, with a perfectly clear image. The 60mm objectives make the image beautifully bright, and I can not detect any chromatic aberration at all, even out at the edges of the field of view. They're great!
Debbie was feeling lousy yesterday, so early in the afternoon we took her temperature: 101°F. Dang! She's got some sort of bug. I'm holding out hope that it's not the lingering malady I had earlier this month, as that was the pits. Her symptoms are different...
