My daughter and I spent the last 5 days up at our cabin. Since it was rainy on Sunday, after after Mass we had lunch at a bar & grille on Castle Rock Lake and then went hiking with our binoculars and cameras at the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge.

Although the guided tours to spy on some very special, rare creatures have been booked months in advance, we followed some less-traveled foot trails and ended up sighting a pair of huge, beautiful Whooping Cranes and were fortunate enough to also hear them calling. (They are the two white blobs in my bad picture)  I was moved to tears by the fortune of getting a glimpse of these endangered beauties in a wild setting. These birds are part of an eastern migratory flock - their incredible story story can be found here.



Besides the crane sightings, I had fabulous bird-watching opportunities at the cabin Monday morning, as most of the songbird babies born in the forest around the house have fledged - so we literally had each nest-ful of "teenage" (juvenile/immature) birds: 5 blue jays, 4 cardinals, 4 rose-breasted grossbeaks and 1 young downy woodpecker AT ONE TIME partaking of sunflower seed, suet and water I put out for them. Needless to say, it was quite a noisy scene; but surprisingly there were no bullies - everyone took their turn getting seeds. We also had 3 hummingbirds at my hummingbird feeder but I could not tell if they were mature or not. And the best treat was a pair - mature male & female - of Baltimore Orioles who seemed interested in the ripening plums on our plum tree.

Monday and Tuesday my daughter and I took horseback riding lessons! I realized after a few minutes that it is sort of like "riding a bike" - all I knew from my many lessons years before came back and I got "Rowdy" (a funny name, as he was so gentle and slow)  to do nice barrel turning and  to trot for me.

Here I am, "back in the saddle again!"