Another Walk Through Town....

We didn't start our walk until nearly 9:00 am this morning....  maybe because it was a little cooler (all right... I was cold, it was in the 70's)...  maybe because we haven't had much luck with birding before 8:30 or so...  maybe we just messed around on our laptops...  I don't know.  But it doesn't matter...  there's always a lot of interesting things to see...

There are dogs everywhere here.  One of these days my blog is going to be about all my doggy friends here, but on a daily basis we see quite a few dogs that we recognize.  Some we know their names...  most we don't....

 I don't know if life is really bad or really good if you sleep in the gutter and use the curb as a pillow...  but this guy could care less one way or the other....  he (or maybe this one's a she) is always there...  even has a sibling (or offspring?) that looks just like him closeby.  Anyway, we didn't disturb his nap.

 These flowers caught my eye...  if/when we ever come back to this place, I'm going to be armed with field guides for everything from the flowers and trees to the butterflies and birds.  We really came unprepared this trip.

 How many iguanas can you see?

We saw 4 or 5 folks with their cameras aimed at this tree...  Oh Ho!  A new bird?  Nope...  they said there are at least 20 iguanas nestled among the treetops.  The tree was quite a distance away, but even at that, it's easy to see there's a whole passel of them!  One of the observers (must have had a good eye) said this is mating season and at least 2 of them were "paired".  Okay, you're right... I looked, but didn't see them.  No iguana porn here....

 We did see a Citreolene Trogon again today.  I hate to sound "ho-hum", but we've seen several so far on this trip and I really want to see an Elegant Trogon.  Do I sound ungrateful?

 Another of the flora that I don't know....  but it is pretty, isn't it?

 Okay....  now we're getting somewhere.

The first Squirrel Cuckoo we've seen this trip.  Not a new bird to us, but new this season.   He's quite large...  maybe 24" in all, with that long tail.    Bill spotted him on our way back down the Lagoon Road.

 We almost always take the road by the church up to the beach, across several hundred yards of beach (right along the ocean) and then cut into a path that leads us back to town.  We'd seen this machine on the city street a few days ago.  There really isn't a whole lot of equipment that Bill doesn't have some knowledge about, but this one wasn't in his "vocabulary".  So he Googled it...  and then told me that it's a "beach cleaner"....  like a street sweeper, only it runs along on the sand, sucking in everything in its path...  running it through a sieve/screen affair, then the debris goes in a hopper, the sand back on the beach.

 Someone had already run it along here...  see the rake marks?  And how clean the beach is?  Of course I wanted to look in the hopper and see what all it had collected, but it's operated by hydraulics so I couldn't.  I have a feeling it's mostly plastic bottles, big rocks...  and dog doo-doo.  But then, what do I know?

 Just past the beach cleaner we turned back to walk along the River Road.  Came across this guy...

He wasn't making a sound...  but he's a Laughing Falcon.

We met him (his species) in Mexico several years ago...  heard him before we saw him...  and yes, he makes a hideous laughing sound that can be pretty eerie when you're alone in the jungle.

We almost always stop for a cup of freshly squeezed orange juice at the end of our walk.  I'm still struggling over the pronunciation of orange in Spanish, but now when I walk up to the counter, the lady just says "jugo?", sparing me my embarrassment.  We're walking home here...  I just liked the composition of the guy on the horse (carrying a mattox), the blue truck, Bill in his green shirt...  and that red cup of juice.  

Not hard to see why I love our daily walks!

That's All For Today!