Wildlife at Painted Views Ranch

Since our last post ......

We finally managed to get garage door openers installed, on all three garage bays, so we have been putting the car in the garage for the past week. The openers are belt driven and are much quieter than with a chain drive, and they have a battery backup (which is good to have when you live out in the country) and even though we have remotes in the vehicles we can open and close doors with our cell phones. It sure makes it nice when we come home with a load of groceries.

The weather has been raining and dreary the past couple weeks and with little sunshine nothing seems to be drying out. It's been mud, mud and more mud.

Of course that has delayed the start of construction on the fish pond. I drove the tractor through the pond site to try to remove some of the rocks that will be in the way and the ground was so mushy there are now bigs ruts from one end of the pond to the other.

In fact, it's been so muddy that our Ranch Foreman Rascal has been keeping up with his surveillance duties from the comfort of the balcony over the front porch.

 

We've been having plenty of wildlife visiting the ranch too. One day last week, as we were having lunch, a grey fox limped along the driveway in front of the house. He didn't let his left front paw touch the ground hardly at all. We wondered what may have happened with him.

 

And today a Great Blue Heron swooped across the front yard, not very far in front of the house. Not a good sign, considering there's a koi pond in our near future.

 

And with the weather lately, with fog and heavy clouds, most of the sunsets have been blocked out, with a few exceptions. Here's one of them. Stay tuned. There are bound to be more.