Recently I went on a walk around Tulsa’s Lafortune Park. The walking trail winds around the park which contains a lot of things. An 18 hole golf course and a par 3 course as well, playgrounds, a pony league and little league ballparks, fishing ponds, a huge tennis complex, a high school, a public swimming pool, a public library and more!! The trail is paved and 3 miles long and is very popular. On warm days I like it’s shady spots.
The clubhouse for the golfcourse has two walls made out of concrete blocks. I don’t know how old they are but they look like the blocks that were common for screen walls back in the 50’s and 60’s.
Don’t see too much of them any longer. I love them. It makes for a screening wall with a lot of visual interest, including geometric shadows.
I’ll finish with these shadows. A tree in our backyard late in the day. I loved the pattern of sunlight and shadows on the tree trunk and limbs.
I aimed the trailcam at a hidden corner of the backyard and when I pulled the chip a few days later I found this image of a fox!! It is beautiful and very small. That pot is only about 15 inches tall.
And here is our rescue terrier Sadie leaping at something. When we play fetch with a ball she bounds after the ball leaping in the air as she goes. She’s a fun dog.
My wife and I found this goose family on a hike.
I think this is a yellow crowned night heron. I found it at Lafortune Park here in Tulsa. I’ve seen them along this creek before.
Here is Lizzie the cat. I am still recovering from my knee replacement surgery and I am itching to get back to yoga so I thought I would try an online class at home. Lizzie wanted to join in but wanted my mat. Found out that I am not ready for regular yoga quite yet. Fortunately there are challenging chair yoga classes that I can take.
And our sleepy little tiny Pomeranian, Kodi. He doesn’t know that he’s tiny is a problem.
A short 20 second video of a few of the birds from the bird feeder cam in our backyard.
I fired up my drone for the first time in a long time. It is Chinese made and partly due to the recent trade squabbles it is a little less friendly than before. But I navigated the changes in controls, got the batteries charged, and launched it right after a wave of thunderstorms came in and right before the next wave. That kind of thing can result in decent sky shots if you are lucky and I guess that I was lucky.
Another neighborhood sky shot, this one from ground level.
And yet another neighborhood shot, same street, different location, different day.
Not all my adventures result in a great time. I hit up my bride for a hike at Oxley Nature Center’s Northwoods Area. She said sounds good and we loaded up and went. Turns out that they are doing some road repairs on the access road, so they have closed it. So I said lets go anyway, so parked alongside the road and walked to the trailhead, about 0.4 miles away. And oops with the access road closed to the trailhead they are not maintaining the trail. We forged on ahead. We had sprayed on some deet at the car but left the bug spray in the car. The mosquitoes were hungry and were about to carry us off. The bride was getting eat up but we marched on ahead anyway but got stopped by a dead fall across the trail at the one mile mark. The brush was too thick to go around it so we came back on a slightly different route.
Not a whole lot of fun but still out in nature.
And I apologize but for some reason this post is not accepting comments from people. I have no idea why.
Coming out of the gym the other day I saw this bike rack with a snaky looking shadow. (In Oklahoma, “snaky” is a word. Like, those woods look kind of snaky to me.”
The squirrels and bunnies are way too used to Kodi, the Pomeranian, who is more interested in barking at other critters than chasing them. Sadie is really interested in chasing them and is a lot faster than Kodi so the resident critters need to be more careful.
Speaking of Kodi here he is. Tail up high so we know he is in a good mood.
An action shot of me with the electric mower.
And Sadie again
And a male northern cardinal out wandering around the backyard for some reason.
Sadie wants to be friends with Lizzie the Cat and Lizzie is okay with that but wants boundaries set. So they will lay cheek to cheek like this but Sadie wants to clean LIzzies ears and when that happens there is a lot of hissing, spitting, yowling and Sadie getting his head whacked on the head by Lizzie’s paws.
An elegant mourning dove at the camera feeder.
A 24 second video of some of the birds at the feeder. You can see more mourning doves, a northern cardinal, a common grackle, and a house finch.
A couple days we had a the Full Flower Moon appear on an evening with clear skies. This is what it looked like when it first become visible on our street.
Zooming in it looked a little like a Giant Peony about to bloom out.
Later on it looked like the full moon we all know and love.
So last Saturday afternoon my bride, Heather, and I loaded up and went downtown to check out Tulsa’s spring arts festival, Mayfest. Mayfest has been going on forever and we used to go to it years ago when it was in the core part of downtown. Heather would come down for lunch and we would walk around looking at the arts and crafts for sale, get something to eat, and listen to music. In the 90’s Hanson would play on one of the side stages. A talented group of youngsters who became famous and are now all growns up with their own children and they still live in the Tulsa area. We’ve seen them from time to time.
The University of Tulsa took over Mayfest some time ago and somewhere along the way they moved out of the core downtown area to the Arts District which is where all the cool kids go for restaurants and bars.
So we walked along checking out the arts and stuff for sale. I didn’t take photos of any of that as I have learned that artists and craftspeople don’t necessarily appreciate their work being photographed and I respect that.
This was the first time since before Covid that we attended the event and we were amazed at the quality of everything we saw.
After a while we got hungry and thirsty so we stepped into Cabin Boys Brewery for some refreshment.
Craft Beer and Nachos were just the thing.
Afterwards we drifted over to Guthrie Green to listen to the music which was also great. I amused myself by taking photos of people taking photos. Hey we are all in this public space and I didn’t take any photos that anybody could find embarrassing.
I’m ending with a flashback to 2016 when I was invited to submit a couple of my instagram photos to an art gallery at Mayfest. Mine were the top two on the top right hand corner. That was my peak artistic experience. I’ve gone downhill every since. (Not really.) I’ll tell you what though the world sure has gone through some topsy turvy things since then.
We finally took our new dog, Sadie, the terrier mix, to a dog park. It had been rainy and cold and we wanted to get our vet to clear Sadie so off we went on one sunny afternoon. Above is my wife Heather with Sadie and Kodi, our pomeranian, in tow.
Sadie loved it. She’s a social butterfly with both dogs and people. She was running here and there making friends with everyone. She was right at home. We kept asking her if she was looking for a new home.
Kodi has always like the park but is much more reserved. This time, our poor little dog, got run over by another dog and that was it for him. We were told when we got him that he is a little dog with BIG FEELINGS, and that is true.
Sadie is making friends with Lizzie the cat. Lizzie insists on boundaries though so even though they may be together eventually we hear a hiss and a paw whacking Sadie on the head when she forgets the boundaries.
Kodi being cute one evening. He looks like a little bear cub.
At Brookwood Pond in Tulsa, here is a Mother’s Day shot. Geese and goslings.
Also at Brookwood Pond, I’m sneaking up on Great Blue Heron. All I had for a camera was my phone.
And at Hunter Park in Tulsa, another phone shot of a Great Blue Heron.
In our backyard an Eastern Bluebird visited our camera feeder.
I attended an event at Turkey Mountain Urban Wilderness Area and afterward went on a short hike. I was going along and I could hear all these birds up in the trees, but could I see them? No!! I then I got to thinking maybe they are not up in the trees, maybe they are down below so that is where I started looking and I started seeing all sorts of little birds close to the ground. I didn’t really have a good lens for taking photos so these are highly cropped and thus a little grainy. Above is a Carolina Wren.
And this is a Tufted Titmouse I think.
I guess that I am not as smart as I thought I was. I have walked miles in the woods over the years listening to the birds up in the trees and that is not where they were. Anyway, I finally learned something.
https://flic.kr/p/2o6pxH7
And Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers.. None of us would be here if were not for our Mothers. This Heather with our son Logan and Kodi back when he was little.
And here is my favorite photo of my mother. She loved fishing and she was good at it. She had mobility issues so she didn’t move around very much but she could catch the fish. This was her favorite spot on Birch Creek in southeast Idaho.
It’s May and we have rainy cloudy days and we have sunny days. I like the sunny days best because I like to be outside. Right now the sunny days are also cool days and those are the best of all.
We won’t have our California weather forever. Soon it will be hot and muggy.
I’m not going to worry about that now!
I try and get outside at least a little bit every single day.
The RiverParks Authority had some big news for Turkey Mountain on Monday. They invited everybody to show for an announcement. Turns out that the Bank of Oklahoma is donating two million dollars to a visitor center on Turkey Mountain. RiverParks only has about six million bucks left to raise.
It’s going to be a visitor center and office for Turkey Mountain all in one. Right now they office in high rise building just out of downtown Tulsa.
(Note photo stolen from Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition facebook site)
They also had free tshirts as a giveaway and snowcones. Better not stand in my way for either one of those. Four members of the Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition board was there, including me.
The city fathers gave speeches patting themselves on the back about turning back a planned outlet mall on Turkey Mountain more than ten years ago. They ignored TUWC’s crucial early work (before I joined the board) but that ‘s okay, what matters is the results and we are off working on other things.
I chatted with a few people I know. It was almost old home week for people who love Turkey Mountain. When I first started coming here all they had was a dirt parking lot. The trails were deer trails or dry streams on the hillsides. There were not really any maps, you just had to learn the trails by getting on them and seeing where they went. Not very sustainable. Now we have all sorts of new designed, sustainable trails. Two big parking lots and a third under construction, and of course soon we’ll have an $8 million dollar visitor center.
And some really nice hiking bridges!!
As popular as Turkey Mountain has become, you get a half mile down the trails you don’t see very many people.
