First Anniversary

It was one year ago today that I began writing these periodic blogs. This was an experiment on my part to see if it was something that I would enjoy and that it served my intended purpose - a convenient way to write, share, and preserve my thoughts in electronic diary form. For the first 3 months, I was quite diligent, posting a new blog about twice a week. With the newness wearing off after that and summertime activities competing for time, my productivity declined to the range of 3 to 4 entries per month. This was of some concern to me because in my experience with other blogs, if they weren't active on at least a weekly basis, my interest in following them waned. But there had to be some sort of balance here between that concern and my available time for getting photos and coming up with new topics. About one new blog per week or 10 days seems to be where I'm most comfortable, and where I don't have to force myself to prepare something that doesn't amount to much. For you faithful followers out there, I hope this is satisfactory and that the relatively low frequency is enough to maintain your interest.

The one aspect of this effort that I am especially pleased with is the relative ease of retrieving older blogs when the desire or need arises. Hand written trip/travel diaries I have kept fairly faithfully in the past have a way of disappearing into desk drawers or under piles of documents where they are difficult to find. I am looking forward to using this blog "vehicle" as my diary for upcoming trips, as I did with the Ecuador series. In some instances, these will be "after the fact" entries because of a lack of internet access or not traveling with a computer. But they will still serve my purposes.

It is a cold and somewhat snowy day here in Helena again, so not much new to publish in the way of photo images. But here are a few that I took on a similar day in mid-April, when there were lots of birds using my feeders. Nothing especially fancy here, but handsome birds none the less!

House finches like this male are the most common visitors to my feeders. But this winter, especially in March and April, Dark-eyed Juncos were unusually common, with perhaps 30 or more present each day during one peak period. The Slate-colored variety(below) are usually the most common here during winter, but early spring juncos this year were dominated by the Oregon variety.