Neighborhood photos

Back again! This time I have the promised neighborhood photos. There are quite a few and not all taken at the same time.

The first few are from a beautiful night walk we took on a brisk fall evening. So far, fall has been far colder than winter for us. Weird I know. Scary weather patterns. Anyway, here goes...

This is the main street that connects to ours.

It was a lovely night, with a lovely sunset.

I took this photo to prove that our leaves DO change color and even sometimes fall off! :) We had a lot of reds and yellows this year due to the cold fall. And the neighbor's tree down the street has been shedding its leaves all over the rest or our yards!

We did see a few nightjars, but due to the fact that it was night, we didn't get any good photos. We hear them a lot though. We've also heard tons of red shouldered hawks of course. There's a barred owl too, that hangs out just outside the back of the house. It's really astonishing to hear him there! Instead of the regular "Hoo" that you hear from the great-horned (usually the one in movies etc), it's a "HOO HOO, Hoo Hoo, Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoooooo" It's hard to explain, but the books describe it as "Whoo cooks for you? Who cooks for you aaaaalll." You'd probably know if you heard it. We've tried to see it a number of times, but it must be able to see/hear us when we turn off the lights and look out the sliding glass doors. Bummer.

This great egret just happened to land in our yard! It's such an unusual occurance that I snapped a photo before it flew off..

And finally, with the nice winter, all of our flowers have been blooming! It's gorgeous! We finally get to see what our irises look like. We've seen these around here a bit, so they must be popular, but I had never seen them before. Aren't they beautiful?

We obviously also have a lot of lizards and frogs. We don't see the natives as much as we did in the apartment, but we did see a frog in our driveway the other night. It was very odd because it had a sort of shriveled, deformed back leg. It got me to thinking about how pollution affects amphibians first due to the fact that they absorb everything through their skin. Kinda sad...

More to come. :)