The painted buntings are back for the summer. They look like little dark sparrows till the sun hits them, when they turn tri-color iridescent green, red, and blue. Tropical. I saw two of them plus an indigo bunting, metallic cobalt blue all over. A colorful bird day.
Near the lower falls I saw one Lincoln's sparrow still sneaking in the brush. Most of them have gone north. Down on the creek, right at the lower falls, a half dozen least sandpipers blittered in the quarter-inch deep sheets of flat water extending over a hundred feet of flat white limestone rock. Upstream, a yellowlegs, I couldn't tell which kind, was methodically probing the deeper water. A black-throated green warbler flitted in a sycamore.
We still have a lot of flowers out, mostly yellow now, except for the spiderworts and a few wild petunias, and the indian paintbrushes. Big pricklypear cactus flowers, bright yellow, perch on ruined-looking cactus pads here and there in meadows of Engelmann daisies and thelespermas.
Unexpectedly, in the middle of the trail, when I was thinking only that I wanted to get back to my car, still a half mile away, and get a drink of water, I find a pile of shockingly bright purple coyote turds. Freshly deposited. I realize I had been lost in thought, as my internal dialog suddenly disappears. The re-enchantment of the world. A steaming pile of purple coyote shit.
It must have been a feast of dewberries. But I didn't examine it that closely.
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The Lower Falls on Onion Creek
Mexican persimmons and gristmill rockwork
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