Matt and I went out to Turnbull last Sunday afternoon for a relaxing drive. We stopped at what I like to call "woodpecker clearing," and turned off the car to wait a while and see if anyone showed up. It was getting fairly late in the evening, and it appeared that the birds had already started to go to bed. After a while, we decided to move on. As I started the car, I looked up at a tree on the other side of the road to see a porcupine munching away!
Neither one of us has ever seen a live porcupine in the wild! He was very cute. Matt jumped out to get a pic (we were taking the driving tour to avoid ticks), and got a pretty good picture - he was only about ten feet away! However, as soon as he got back in the car (he was only out of it for about 2 minutes), he was already picking off ticks!! YUCK! We continued the drive and really didn't see much - even the osprey nest was empty! Near the end of the drive I stopped at a place where I had recently seen a gorgeous male yellow-rumped warbler and stopped the car again. I could hear a few pygmy nuthatches in the distance, but nothing was showing up. Then Matt elbowed me, and I looked where he had his binoculars pointed - 5 feet from the car towards a six foot Ponderosa Pine on the side of the road - and there was a red-naped sapsucker! He was so close that we could see the grubs he was getting out of the tree! Talk about neat! It was a good spot by Matt, because even when I knew he was there, I still couldn't see him without binocs (due to obscuring limbs).
There were lots of wildflowers out and about. It was too dark to get good pics, but I did get some of these "grass widows." Isn't that a terrible name! They were everywhere. It was very picturesque.
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I saw my first in-the-wild porcupine this year too. He liked to hang out at the top of a tree at one of the local ski resorts. We got a great view of him each time we rode a particular lift. I'm not sure if he ever came down. We saw him there for weeks.
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