The last two years, we did a sideways migration and flew East for the fall, just enough of a pattern to make me wistful lately. It’s been a long year and a good one for taking it easy, but I’ve missed my annual trek home.
I think the towhees (great pictures there, although the first two are darker than what we get) sum it up nicely for the season: Eastern towhees are splotches of bright colors. Californian towhees, however, are the ultimate drab brown bird, a little plump, their wings a little droopy, with no more color than a dry October hillside being watched cautiously by the fire stations before the rainy season starts up.
Autumn just doesn’t quite have the same visual punch of leaves turning across the hillsides en masse here.
And yet. Where else on earth would I get to watch a small baby black squirrel trying to bury his cache for the winter in the ground–and it’s an olive?