An Amazing Sight

Our voluntary trip to Flagstaff for the second day in a row began at about 9 AM. We stopped at the front desk to get last minute instructions from Chi Chi about where the office was in Flagstaff and to get the list of items to pick up at Home Depot. There were lots of food items to pick up and the Home Depot list included beams, saw blades, nails and some roof hardware. This turned out to be a major trip to perform resort business on our day off.

The trip itself was made worthwhile because on the way up to Flagstaff, we saw the most amazing sight we've ever seen. What looked like birds or stumps from a distance turned out to be at least 500 elk grazing in the lake bed of Mormon Lake. The pictures below can give some idea of this sight:

Josie had brought her binoculars and even though you can't tell from these pictures, there were many, many, huge bulls in that herd. It is unbelievable that there could be so many elk in one place in this area. It was like a convention. The first picture, even though you can't see the elk real well, still doesn't capture all of the elk that were there. Then, on our way home at about 2 PM, we discovered that the elk were still there, and moving into what was left of the water in Mormon Lake:
The difference in the afternoon was that most of the elk were just bedded down. What a sight! That took the sting out of wasting a day off to do lodge business. When you think about all these elk in one place, and the fact that the forest is still full of elk, you begin to gain an appreciation of just how many elk there are in this area of Arizona.

The excitement didn't end there though. We have been filling up our hummingbird feeder almost twice a day, from the previous schedule of about once a week. The reason is that our feeder has been discovered by a flock of hummingbirds that literally fight over a spot on the perches. I tried to capture a picture of all these birds but they are so fast that this is the best I could do:

This picture shows 5 hummingbirds, but we've seen as many as 7 at the feeder at the same time. We ordered another of these window feeders that we will place on another window so we can watch even more of them. We have been so fascinated by these birds that we started researching their habits and the species that are in this area. We can now tell the difference between the males and females and have learned a lot about their habits. For example, the females have white edges on their tail feathers, have crimson feathers around their neck, make the nests, hatch the babies and care for them, while the males do nothing. Sounds fair to me.

All in all it was a nice break the last two days. Today we start early - 7 AM - and get off at 3. It will be busy as we again get ready for the weekend crowd. Til tomorrow...