I rarely post a picture on my BLOG that was taken by someone else; but today is different from other days.  I have to share a most wonderful gift, a picture captured by Sue Warner of Mendocino. Sue invited Margaret and me to stay at her house in the Redwoods with Tillie, the Golden Retriever, and Abigail, the black beauty of the cat world, while she was off vacationing in Hawaii.  If you saw the pictures on my BLOG during the hree weeks we were there, you’ve seen Sue’s house and her in-house menagerie.  You saw a deer that paid a visit to her place while we were there. You saw a bunch of ocean and river pictures.  What you didn’t see was a picture of a mountain lion and her cub who paid a visit the first night we were there.  Sue has a camera set up on the driveway to her house to catch pictures of animals passing in the night. It’s not part of a security system. She wants to see the creatures who share the place in the woods with her. After she got back from Hawaii and we returned to San Diego, she downloaded the images from her special camera and found this great picture. We were sound asleep a few hundred yards away when these two came calling.

Back home on our own little urban farm, we’re still in the business of raising chicks… hummingbird babies.  When the diligent mother hummer flew off for a few minutes to get a bite to eat on Friday afternoon, I checked the nest and there were two eggs. I checked again this morning and was surprised to find broken shells and two incredibly small bald baby birds. In three weeks time they will put on fine feathers and have grown big enough to fly away.