I'm not familiar with the friendly Labrador pup who was hanging off the top of his owners' fence, so it was a bit startling when he kept waving his paws and barking his greetings from across the street during an evening hike. The sleepy cat in the window lives a couple of blocks away and never does anything more than blinking her sonambulic eyes at me as if to say, 'Here's lookin' at you, crab!'
Chula Vista is really quite a birdy place. A big change for me is the near absence of poopy pigeons. We have many different sorts of smart-alecky sparrows, though, and some more exotic species. These ones I've managed to capture on film are: 1. barn swallow (he is one of the clan who has built a nest right under my eave), 2. western scrub jay (close up shots are his worst nightmare, I'm afraid. The curious fellow actually looks a lot more handsome from a bit further away), 3. vermilion flycatcher (likes to bounce around the golf course like a flying red ping pong ball), 4. western bluebird (there are a bunch of them around along with some eastern bluebird counterparts. Those have white/gray belly instead of all blue), 5. red-tailed hawk (this one likes to perch on my neighbor's backyard fence overlooking Telegraph Canyon Rd), 6. acorn woodpecker (a whole family of them lives in this cottonwood tree on a golf course not far from my pad. I think the males are the red-headed).
Most of these are quite wild, though some, like this friendly little dove, aren't averse to creatures' comfort... apparently.
