Winter Views

Driving home from Christmas shopping on December 19th afforded us these lovely views of the valley below our mountains, (the Sierra Nevada mountains) with the western mountains shadowing the valley even as the lower eastern mountains (the Pine Nut mountains) were still bathed in sunlight. Please click on the photos for a closer view.

The small community nestled up against the mountain as we drove above it looks like it could be part of a Christmas card, with the barren trees and distant rugged ranchlands dusted with snow.

As we rise up the mountain, the valley fades into the distance as the steep road, the craggy mountains, the deeper snow and the pines take precedence. A few miles more and we'll be home.

Quail!

Quail show up for a brief couple of months at the end of summer here - they travel in family groups and they're really cute, but man, are they fast. And nervous. They are come and gone in an instant, running on their stretched-out legs and disappearing over a rock or behind a tree, in seconds. They also blend in with the ground and bushes really well, so they're hard to see.

But today I was blessed! My husband saw them and called out to me, and I was able to get some close up shots of a quail right near me, for some reason it either didn't realize I was there or it wasn't scared of me. I quietly opened the back door and click, click, click, I got a few pretty good photos:

I have a photo from last year with three of them running like mad across the lawn, they were over that edge in a second but my camera was quicker:

I hope you'll click, click, click on these photos to see them bigger. :)

I believe the species of quail in these photos are "Mountain Quail", but the photos on the Internet always show much fatter and sleeker quail than I see here in the high Sierra Nevada mountains. However, I did determine that these are not "California Quail" because they don't have the feathers on their fronts that look like fish scales. The main threats to quail are hawks, coyotes and feral cats, not to speak of hungry humans. Hunting is limited to 10 quail a day by permit as I understand it.

I enjoy seeing them each year and hope I can continue to photograph them in the future.