On Monday, March 28th Denny, Lillian and I walked around the Tucson Botanical Gardens smelling the fragrances of Orange trees in bloom and many flowers, seeing plants like Mexican Buckeye, cacti sporting unimaginably small flowers and a large bronze sculpture of vegetables with an Inca Dove nesting in its arm. We enjoyed the warmth of Arizona for the last time for a while.

It has been a great 2 months with lots of birding, painting, pickleball and best of all being with our Arizona friends and friends from Colorado and even Greenfield.

I did 4 different painting jobs, most of them taking about 3-4 days each with the last one just a half day job at the end. Here are some pictures from 3 of them:

The last time I was in AZ I painted the 2 sides of this screen with dragonflies, cattails and frogs. This year I painted the middle with a swamp and 7 birds. The circles on the screen are colored glass and were part of the original screen.

Another friend I met playing pickleball wanted the arch in her kitchen painted with Native American images. I did this one and next year I’m going to do one over her bedroom.

I also had a job at the Tucson FBI building. It was very interesting working there. Denny was with me and we had to show our ID’s to get in and had to leave all electronic devices in the car. We even had an escort to watch us all the time we were there. We never went inside the building so never had to go through any metal detectors.

We had a great, but too short visit, with our friends Donna and Tom from Grand Junction, CO. We had to go to Tucson one day to pick up our landlords at the airport so we took an extra car and did some things in Tucson. We went to Reid State Park and had a picnic and visited the ponds with all the ducks.

Then we went to Sweetwater Wetlands and watched a Pied-billed Grebe eat a frog. He really struggled with it for a while but finally got it. We also saw an American Bittern in the reeds and a brief look at a Bobcat.

One of our favorite parks is Agua Caliente. It is up in the NE area of Tucson. We visited on a school day and there were quite a few classrooms taking place there. It’s a great place for learning about nature. We also saw our FOY Lucy’s Warblers and Yellow Warblers.

After we left Agua Caliente we went to Ft. Lowell Park where we saw our FOY Bullock’s Oriole. We also saw some frisky hybrid ducks trying to get the best of a female.

On our last weekend our neighbors and friends from home, Cyndie and Andy came to visit family in Tucson so we spent a day with them walking some of Sabino Canyon on a 90 degree day and having lunch in Ventana Canyon.

The day before we went up to the motel near the airport in Tucson Lillian went with us to Patagonia Lake State Park and Paton’s where they are famous for their Hummingbirds. We saw 5 different hummers: Violet-crowned, Anna’s, Rufous, Black-chinned and ubiquitous Broad-billed:

At the Lake visitor’s center there were lovely flowers in bloom with many Hummingbird Moths:

For some reason there aren’t a lot of pictures but here’s one of nests in the trees.

We ended up with 61 birds for the day, some of them seen for the first time this year. We ended the day meeting Hilda and Michael at La Bocanita (a great seafood, Mexican Restaurant. The next day we went to the Botanical Garden for our last hurrah and flew out early the next morning. Great trip!