When I started my blog, lo these many years ago, it was, in part, to celebrate that unexpected wonder around us.

But it’s been a hard few years for all of us, and I just wasn’t feeling so wonderful.

Yesterday I went out birding with Anne, one of the folks I met on my recent trip to Mexico to see the Monarch butterflies, and her friend. Anne took me to a suburban greenbelt not far from where I live. She got very excited as we walked along the creek under an underpass, with cars roaring over head. I thought really?

Anne was pointing to the rocks across the creek. “Do you see them?”

No. I did not see them. There were a bunch of wet grey rocks across the creek … some of which were moving.

American Dippers!

An American Dipper waits on a rock to spot a critter in the water.

She sees something!

And in she goes!

I have only seen an American Dipper once before on a pika hike several years ago, for a brief moment before it disappeared. So it was a treat to watch this one hunt for insects in the creek.

American Dippers used to be called Water Ouzels, a word I just love, but that name belonged to robin-like birds in Europe.

American Dippers live from Alaska and Canada all the way down to Guatamala and Honduras, so obviously they can withstand a range of temperatures. What they must have, though, is fast moving water, which means that they are birds of the mountains. They will walk along the stream bed in the water to get to a tasty critter, and sometimes even go completely underwater. We saw both behaviors yesterday.

A nice shot of the Dipper before she went back to work. Dippers get their names from their habit of bobbing on their legs as they watch the water rushing past.

I kept this one because I love her stubby little tail. I guess a tail isn’t much use to a bird that walks along the stream bed.

What Anne had really brought me to see, though, was a pair of nesting Great Horned Owls. Here’s mama sitting on the eggs in an old magpie nest. Anne thinks the eggs will hatch in the next week to ten days.

Papa owl looked on from a tree on the other side of the path. Another woman we were walking with said later that she saw papa return with a vole in it’s mouth and give it to mama. I NEED TO COME BACK TO SEE THIS!

A pair of Hooded Mergansers paddled up and down the creek as we walked along it. Hooded Mergansers overwinter in Colorado, but need old-growth hardwood forest trees to nest in, so we were lucky to see these two before they head east.

A female Belted Kingfisher. In a shocking reversal of the usual male-birds-are-showier pattern, females wear the belt in this species, while males have an all white belly. Again, I had only seen a glimpse of a Kingfisher before, so that was pretty special.

And all this within a couple of miles of my house.

Wonder has returned.