Birds, Bees and Spring Flowers in the Desert

We are in an area where there is a significant amount of water. Talk about an oasis in the desert. The Colorado river is just down the road, and there are ponds, small lakes, and marshes everywhere.

A couple times I have gone walking in an area where they are doing preservation work to ensure the birds have habitat. It’s a great place, with water and marshes.

Yesterday when I went there, the Tamarisk trees were beautiful. They are a big floofy tree, and in spring they get a ton of these tiny pink flowers.

The real beauty, is when you get close up though. Each cluster of flowers is made up of a bunch of little ornate blossoms. They range in color from a really pale pink, almost white, to a beautiful darker pink.

This image with the bee, shows just how small these individual flowers are.

I also got a bee checking out this pink flower. I don’t know what this one is, but they are everywhere near the water.

These are Screwbean Mesquite seed pods. Yes, I had to look that one up. They are about 2 inches long, and really hard. These are left over from last year, so they are dried up. Super cool looking though. Fun fact, all the mesquite trees have seed pods, and the mesquite beans are eaten by animals, and people. The Native Americans ground them up to make flour, but they can be eaten whole too. Apparently the screwbean mesquite tree is  fairly rare, and that explains why I have never seen these before.

Other birds we’ve seen in our wanderings. A Redtail hawk.

The cute little verdin are pretty common.

And this was quite the thing to capture. We saw this kestrel, way up in a tree. When I was taking pictures, I could see a hummingbird flying near him. Apparently the kestrel was too close to his nest.

I hope he scared him off.

And, hummingbirds. I have to take the feeder down during the day now, because the bees have figured it out and we have a swarm of bees outside the RV. Not good.

But evening is a good time for photos anyway.

And speaking of evening, every night when the sun starts to go down hundreds of swallows fly overhead. They are coming from the desert, and going to the reservoir, and I imagine other water were they can catch bugs. It’s such a cool thing to see.

This is Senator Wash reservoir, and it’s on the edge of the LTVA area where we are staying. Lots of people camped near there, as you can imagine.

Still, it’s nice to have water and different places to explore so close by.