Counting critters {and a day-trip re-cap}

{Yes, Mother, that is my hand holding a horned toad.}
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My husband {Doug} and I take a lot of weekend road trips. Sometimes these trips include camping for the weekend, and other times we'll take a little day trip. We always look for wildlife along the way, and our drive back home always includes a re-cap of the animals we spotted on that trip. Our typical list usually includes a cottontail or jack-rabbit, lizards, a ground squirrel, tarantulas, and on occasion deer, elk or javelina. One time we actually saw a brown bear in the road! Now mind you, it's mostly common for us to maybe see ONE animal in an entire weekend...if we're lucky.

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Last Sunday we packed a picnic lunch and headed to Mt. Ord (it's the mountain in the above photo with the radio towers on top...back right portion of the photo) - a 1-hour and 15-minute drive from our home. During our 5-hour trek away from home, we actually saw three different types of animals! And even better, I got pictures of each of them.

These two white-tail deer were on the side of the road and I actually spotted them before Doug did (not that there's a competition thing going on here, but he just has a keen eye for spotting animals and I rarely get to see them first)! The really cool thing is that we stopped the truck and I took several pictures before these two beauties sauntered off into the woods.
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We parked the truck and decided to hike for a while and on our trail Doug spotted this horned toad along the way. Tricky to spot (I told you he has a keen eye!) but fairly easy to capture and photograph - as evidenced by the first photo of this post. (Can you spot the toad in the photo above?)

And! We spotted two bright yellow birds (I thought they were wild parakeets but Doug disagreed) that had the sweetest song and fluttered around in the trees while we ate lunch.


It was such a beautiful day, and a really fun trip! I'm thinking of making a "Critter Journal" for us to keep to document all the wild animals we see along the way...

Yes. I'll add that to my list...

We love living in Arizona.
♥