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Parts of the ground on the sage-covered hillside by our house are covered with dried Live Oak leaves, so when I heard the loud CRUNCH of something large walking slowly through, I grabbed my camera and tip-toed about 30 feet outside my door and there they were! Two California black-tailed deer (tail not shown)!

With the morning sun shining on them just so you can almost FEEL the velvet that’s covering their antlers. You can see it in the image like a soft glow of bright light around them.

Oh, and you can click on the main photo or the one to the left here in the frame to get a framed or unframed print of this fortuitous morning sighting!

It’s been an animal-ish kind of day already. On my morning walk with the dog, we saw three deer, one definitely an older buck as he good sized antlers (almost wrote ‘a nice sized rack’, but then I reconsidered.) Then, while I was eating breakfast, heard the chirping squirrel alarm go off outside and saw a coyote wandering around looking for his breakfast. And I was able to get a decent picture before I scared him off.

Coyotes are so rangy looking. Hard to picture this one wearing Acme rocket skates though. 😉

Well, it looks as though we’ll be keeping little Eggbert the dove, but I made John agree that we’d reached our upper limit for birdom right now. And another thing – we’re 80% sure that Eggbert is a SHE, so she’s now Egberta. The cool thing here is that the name Egbert/Egberta is Old English for “shining sword”! So yes, it’s a weird name, but with a cool meaning, so we can keep it. Also because we can’t stop calling her Eggie, so I’m glad to have a good excuse to keep the name.

And here’s a recentish photo of Egberta – not a full grown dove yet, but sort of the equivalent of a teenager.

Since taking this picture we’ve moved her to a new, larger cage with nice perches and plenty of room to stretch her wings. And speaking of stretching her wings, yesterday I was adjusting something in her cage and she flew right out the large door, around the room, and landed on the sunny windowsill! Luckily, we’d been getting her used to us handling her (or maybe she was just really shocked at her own daring!), so she stayed still while I picked her up in both hands and put her back in the cage.

Eggbert is still a bit smaller than the adult doves, but he’s looking a LOT more dove-like and much less like a feathery fuzz ball. I know birds grow quickly, but to go from a small egg to this size in three weeks just amazes me. So herrrrrrre’s Eggbert!