The Weather, Game Cameras, and Amazing Grace..

The weather turned kind of cool here...  still 50's during the night, but last night there was a possibility it could have gotten into the 40's.  It didn't...  but still...  the 50's is cold to me.


I've been having problems with the internet....  we have the satellite dish and have used it here in the same site for several years.  But the trees keep growing taller each year - Bill keeps putting the dish further out from our rig.  And still we have bad service.  Oh well...  when I get desperate I take my laptop up to the visitor center and plug in to their service. 


So while I might think of a million things to blog about each day, I just don't get around to getting it done.


I write a lot about my game cameras...  I love them...  love seeing what roams around out there at all hours of the night and day.  I move them around to different places hoping to find where most of the game activity actually is.  Below the camera took photos of me...  trying to secure it to a tree using only the steel cables.

Hmmmm..  maybe it goes a little this way.....  no...  that didn't work...  let's see....  more to the right... nope...  oops!  now I've got it focused on the sky...  Well, heck...  I sure don't need any photos of my mugg....  guess I do look a little perplexed.....  Okay...  I think I have it now.  


To make matters worse, the other day I lost the keys to the steel cable....  I KNEW the keys had to be near the cameras...

I asked Bill if he's go back with me to the camera sites to help look...  As you can see, the camera (which I couldn't shut off since I'd lost the key) took a lot of pictures of us as we looked...  and looked....  and looked.  We both had on our Bug Shirts....  We look like a couple of forensic specialists looking for clues without trying to leave our own traces, don't we?  But after 2 trips out to the sites to look, we did find the keys...  AND...  you can see in the bottom left photo that I tied a big piece of pink ribbon on them so they'd be highly visible.


Today we saw bears 4 different times.  Actually, there were only 3 bears... we saw one in the same area about an hour after sighting it the first time...

This was taken by the game camera...  he/she's a young bear...  probably only a year or 2 old.

As I've written before, this refuge provides nesting grounds for the Upland Sandpiper...

I love this picture!

He really isn't marking his territory, but it sure looks like it, doesn't it?

I'm still painting gate posts...  Bill has been doing trail maintenance...  also doing some weed-eating around the kiosk and refuge signs.  Today, while he was whacking weeds, I saw this Great spangled fritillary butterfly...

I don't see a big variety of butterfly species here so I really enjoy what I spot.  This guy had lit on a clover head....  

In a prior post I wrote that sometimes Kirk brings his dog Gracie to work with him.  Gracie is not quite 7 months old, so still has a lot of "puppy" traits.

The Visitor Center has a lot of wildlife displays, and one prominent display is a Coyote....

When Gracie bounds into the Visitor Center, she runs over to the stuffed coyote and gives it a kiss.  Kirk says she's done that since he first brought her to work.  He thinks maybe Gracie thinks it's her mother.

She doesn't seem to notice that the coyote doesn't reciprocate...  Believe me, Gracie gets enough love and affection from Kirk .....  as well as anyone else she meets!

That's All For Today!