Celebrating Our Anniversary 2024

I told you I'd talk about our anniversary. How we celebrated it the Saturday of Screen Free Week. May 11 was National Babysitter's Day so the kids watched over Jet so Jeremy and I could get out bright and early and meet with other birders to see the Provo Delta Restoration area. Special access. Woohoo. It's supposed to open toward the end of this year so I am super excited to take our kids there when it does.

See my date shirt?

 

Oh, the birds. So many birds. Different habitats so that made more of a variety of birds. There was grassland, trees, open water. We saw sparrows, warblers, ducks. It was awesome.

If you're not a birder you may not get the excitement so let me show you some pictures of that adventure. 

 

Spotted Sandpipers

Ducklings

 

 Yellow Warbler

 

Coyote (not a bird)

 

Can you spot the killdeer eggs?

How about now?

Man, killdeer nests are hard to see. I was walking along and wouldn't have noticed except Jeremy called out that there was a nest right there on the side of the path. Good thing its not open to the public yet. There was a killdeer doing its broken wing trick trying to lead us away. But that doesn't help us to avoid the nest since they lay their eggs right among the rocks where people walk and we're not trying to actually chase after the adult. Crazy.

See this picture? We're cute. I know it. This is where the delta water meets up with the lake. See those trees back there? The trail used to continue on from where we're standing through those trees. I remember walking along there years ago. Not anymore. Instead the trail currently ends at a fence a little ways back from this spot. It's been like that for a while now since they've been working on the project. This was the first time we'd been on this side of the fence. Fun. I'm pretty sure the existing trail will connect with the trail that goes along the delta when everything is finished. Yay. 

 

After we finished with our meandering in the delta area, we drove around to see a few places then drove to a spot where we ran into a birder who had been with our group earlier. She told us that several of the birders had been to see a Northern Waterthrush, an elusive bird I had seen only once before and that happened to be two years ago while Jeremy and I were celebrating our anniversary by birding. It's a thing.

We went toward the area the birder told us and met up with other birders from that morning as well as... one of our librarian friends from Orem Library. We found out that she'd just gotten into birding a year ago so she had seen the Northern Waterthrush with the other birders. Small world. They all took off and Jeremy and I went to see the bird and got a better look than ever before... and our own pictures. Love it.

We were hungry after we finished and were trying to figure out what to eat then duh, of course we remembered Winco salads. That's our traditional date food. So we got our salads and took them home to eat and rest for a couple hours before heading out again to celebrate our anniversary without the kids... but with another birding friend.

The week before, Jeremy, Nichole, and Lucky had gone out to see a new to them bird, a sagebrush sparrow. Jeremy even got a lifer dance. 

That evening, Jeremy, our birding friend, and I went back out and got to see the sagebrush sparrow, which was a lifer for our birding friend and me. We also got good looks at some other birds. It was a successful birding evening.

We saw several kinds of sparrows. Here are somewhat good pictures of a couple more (besides the sagebrush sparrow).

Black-throated Sparrow

 

Lark sparrow

We also saw...

Juniper Titmouse

 

Gray Vireo

and several other birds.

 

Man, that was such a good day. Birding with my sweetheart. What a great way to celebrate our love.

All Day Birding

I got to go on a field trip with Utah County Birders. My sweet husband held down the fort at home so I could go. He is so sweet to me and I appreciate how he encourages me and supports me. I do the same for him.

So this was my turn. It ended up being an all day birding trip from morning to night. We went East in Utah to Ouray National Wildlife Refuge, Pelican Lake Wildlife Management Area, and Starvation Reservoir State Park.

I got to see some first of the year birds and...

see my lifer dance?

I got to see an American Bittern for the first time. One of my nemesis birds. I've heard bitterns before but I've never seen one.

And this is about the look I got of it:

If you look really closely at the stick in the middle of the other sticks in the center of this picture, that is the bittern sticking its bill up in the air. It is a common pose in which to find those birds.

It took forever for the patient birders to point it out for me. But I saw it. Yay!

Other highlights of the trip:

Several first of the year birds including mountain bluebirds and pinyon jays.

Porcupine. Not a bird but always fun to see.

Lots and lots of loons. I never thought I'd say this phrase, "Oh, it's just another loon," but I did on this trip.

Also lots of sandhill cranes. At one stop there were 25-30 sandhill cranes that we could see.

Ospreys are always fun to see (especially when they're carrying fish. This particular osprey was not carrying a fish but I saw others that were).

A nicely posed Loggerhead Shrike on the way out.

It was a good trip. I love this community of birders.