A Duck Skims Across the Lake

About a week ago, Veron­ica and I returned from vis­it­ing my mom in Car­son City, Nevada. We were there for about a week, and did a whole bunch of fun stuff, like swim­ming in and boat­ing on Lake Tahoe, see­ing a bizarre pro­duc­tion of A Mid­sum­mer Night’s Dream, vis­it­ing the Nevada Art Museum, get­ting a guided tour of an area with lots of pet­ro­glyphs, and attend­ing the Car­son City Jazz Fes­ti­val. I took a bunch of pic­tures, and will be post­ing them in chunks over the next week or so.

Pray­ing Mantis

The first set of pic­tures is from Washoe Lake, which lies just north of Car­son City. Much of the shore of the lake is part of a state park, which includes a cou­ple of wildlife obser­va­tion plat­forms. Walk­ing around the south­ern shore of the lake, we saw quail, ducks, but­ter­flies, and a lone great blue heron. I almost stepped on a large pray­ing man­tis, who I was cer­tainly not expect­ing to find on the gravel path on which we were walk­ing. (S)he was a very coop­er­a­tive model, let­ting me take lots of pic­tures, and at times even seem­ingly mug­ging for the camera.

Red-Tailed Hawk

At Lit­tle Washoe Lake, just north of its larger name­sake, we spot­ted a clus­ter of pel­i­cans float­ing, with one soar­ing over­head. Unfor­tu­nately, they were too far away for any decent pho­tos. While dri­ving between the lakes, how­ever, we came upon a red-tailed hawk perch­ing on a bale of hay. I man­aged to snap a cou­ple of pic­tures from the car before he flew off to join a friend atop a nearby tele­phone pole.

Click any of the above pho­tos to see the whole gallery.