This is for the Birds! and a Peach Update

While we were camped at Caddis Flats Campground near Placerville, Colorado, Denisa seemed to take an unusual number of pictures of birds. So this blog is for the birds! For example, we did some bird watching from our camp site. These little yellow birds were busy with the purple thistle plants that have gone to seed.

Denisa watched as this little bird de-fuzzed the entire thistle head, pausing only momentarily from her work for this picture.

Another day we took a drive just west of us at Woods Lake.

Shortly after we arrived it started to sprinkle, and we were afraid our kayak plans would be rained out. But like the other showers we have experienced this summer, it was just long enough for the five other paddle boarders to hustle off the water and take cover. So after the short rain, we had the lake to ourselves! Without those other paddlers, the water was perfectly still to mirror the mountains and clouds in front of us.

Well, actually we didn't have the lake all to ourselves. We had to share it with the resident birds. We don't often take pictures of ravens, but this pair looked so different from each other. One looked so sleek . . .

and the other not so sleek. We guess that if a person can have a bad hair day, then a bird can have a bad feather day.

The gray clouds that brought the rain shower were making some interesting cloud shadows and sun streaks in the sky as we continued our float around Woods Lake.

As we brought the kayak back into the dock, Denisa was taking more pictures of--you guessed it--the water birds.

It was fun to see this little guy, mirrored in the lake water below him.

We were the only ones left at the lake as we dried out the kayak and loaded it into the car. It doesn't follow with the bird theme, but we have to include the picture of the mule deer buck that appeared out of the forest for his evening drink at the lake.

Back to the birds--yesterday on the trail we found this ptarmigan hiking just in front of us.

About the size of a chicken, these birds have brown feathers to blend with the forest floor where they usually hang out. In the winter, they will have white feathers to match their snowy environment.

Sometimes we need a random blog to use up some random pictures, and this seems to be a good day for that. So we thought we would also make a random update to what we did with all those peaches we bought in Orchard City. Remember that beautiful 25 pound box of just-picked peaches?

Well, we gave some of them away to neighbors, and we used some of them on bran flakes for breakfast. Dozens more went on hikes, where they made a tasty trail treat. But dozens more went to make desserts. We first made a four-layer peach delight (and forgot to take a picture). Then we made a peach crunch (which is a little different from a peach crisp), that was delicious topped with ice cream.

Then we used a strawberry dessert recipe and substituted it with peaches to make the first-ever fresh peach frozen fluff (and forgot to take a picture). Our final dessert was a brownie cheese cake, and instead of topping it with the usual cherry pie filling, we topped it with homemade peach sauce.

All of our peach experiments were tasty, and we are sad to say that all 25 pounds of peaches are now gone. So now we can end this random blog, by saying that we are having a good wander through Colorado, eating Colorado peaches and taking pictures of Colorado birds. How random is that?!?