What was that bird?

A friend and I went birding at the Desert Wetlands Park here in Las Vegas this morning. Shortly after getting out of the car I spotted a big bird on the top of the flag pole. At first I thought it was an ornament. But no, it moved ... a little. I thought it was a falcon, what kind I did not know. We asked the person at the information center and she admitted knowing little about birds but was sure it was an owl. Another group of birders said, not an owl, a hawk. One of their party thought it looked pregnant. Huh.

Next time I go I take my good camera with the zoom lens! And I need to take a good birding course.

All in all we had a great time and saw birds we COULD identify -- among them a roadrunner, great blue heron, double crested cormorant, black phoebe, snowy egret, and belted kingfisher.

Rhyolite

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving a couple of friends and I drove to the ghost town of Rhyolite. It is located just outside of the small town of Beatty. There were a surprising number of people visiting that day, perhaps because of a recent article about the nearby Goldwell Open Air Museum in CAA's magazine Via.

Dog On It / Spencer Quinn

I've always thought mysteries with cat protagonists were silly, so I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Dog On It. The narrator, Chet, is a mixed breed dog. Quinn does a wonderful job at getting inside his doggie mind, at least at what we humans imagine to be in there.

At one point in the story they go off to Las Vegas which Bernie (the human private detective) refers to as the "ninth circle." Chet sees The Strip as "a broad avenue lined with weird buildings, weird lights, weird people, weird everything."