Some Birds and Some Signs

This bird is a wren and it is perched atop a cactus, I believe it is a chain cholla (pronounced choya) cactus. The bird is a cactus wren, a very common bird found here in the south west. They are also very noisy and sing constantly and chase each other around. They are a neat bird. The yellow flower buds on the cholla contain small spines and if you pick them bare handed you will spend hours trying to get the basically invisible spines out of your fingers. OUCH! Fortunately the wren does not seem to have that problem.

Every RV Park we have stayed in has posted speed limits. Some are 8 MPH some 10 MPH and other similar speed limits. Willow Wind the park we stayed at in Hurricane, Utah had a speed limit of 11 MPH. Here at Hidden Valley Ranch RV Park outside of Deming it is 10 MPH in some places and 8 MPH in others but they have these tortoise signs scattered around indicating that you should slow down. Neat sign.

These are Northern Pintail ducks. The image was taken over in Whitewater Draw. Note how long the pintail is on the duck in the back. They are strikingly marked birds. The audubon.org website indicates that the Northern Pintail is one of the most numerous duck in the world.

This is on the wall in the club house here at Hidden Valley Ranch RV. It seemed to be painted on and was very well done. In case you cannot read the sign the character is holding in his hand it says "Got Milk?". I think it is a wonderful spoof on the advertising campaign for the California Milk Processors Board that featured the “Got Milk” slogan in the mid 1990’s and later added the milk mustache. Well done cartoon – “Got Milk?”

We took a short trip to a New Mexico State Park called City of Rocks which is about 35 miles from where we are staying. This bird that we found there was very appropriate for the state park as it is called a Rock Wren. We will get back to the City of Rocks in a bit and provide a more detailed blog post of that location.

There are several of these speed limit signs along the dirt road coming into Hidden Valley Ranch RV Park. We think it is saying that the cattle or cows are limited to no more than 35 MPH. We did not see any signs indicating that radar detection devices are being used nor did we see any cattle police along the road watching for speeding cattle so our assumption might be in error.

This picture is of a Red-tail Hawk as is the next one. There is a huge variety of markings on the Red-tail that sometimes they almost look like different species. We have seen a lot of Red-tail Hawks in our limited travels around the southwest.

This is another view of a different Red-tail. It was really windy when we took this image and you can clearly see a belly band and the feathers puffed out in the wind. This bird to me looks different than the one above yet they are the same species.

This sign was up against a window in a local eatery here in Deming. The punishment for smoking is a little harsh though we looked out back and there were no bodies hanging from the trees so the policy must be working. When we stopped for diesel one day I needed to go inside to get a receipt for our purchase. The person in line on front of me was buying cigarettes. They purchased four packs and the cost was $32.80. Maybe they needed to see and adhere to this sign in the restaurant, they could save a lot of money.

We hope you enjoyed this blog post and as always let us know if you have any questions or comments.

All the best – George & Deanna