Last Saturday's Trip

Hello, everyone!  It's me, Cam!  Mom has finally finished going through her 87 million photos from last weekend, so Mags and I thought we'd share some with you.  Are you ready to take a look?  It's photo-heavy, so I'll try not to be too chatty!

Here is a shot of us girls at the Kansas Wetlands Education Center's Butterfly Garden:

"Don't lose your head, Maggie!"
"Too late, Cam!"

They have a lot of beautiful flowers that attract all kinds of butterflies - especially Monarchs!

KS Wetlands Ed Center's Butterfly Garden

They're even having a Butterfly Festival in a couple of weeks! I wonder if they have little rides for the butterflies to go on and stuff? Probably.

On to birding! We saw lots of different kinds of Sandpipers, like ...

Pectoral Sandpipers

Stilt Sandpiper

Least Sandpipers

Am I the only one who feels bad that some are called "Least"?  And there's the "Lesser" versus "Great" thing, too.  For instance ...  we have the Yellowlegs:

Lesser Yellowlegs

Greater Yellowlegs

Who decides who is "great"?  Just seems sort of judgmental to me.

We saw this little guy down on one of the beaches:

Killdeer

For some reason, Mom was glad Maggie and I were snoozing in the backseat when she spotted this guy:

Ornate Box Turtle

For those who may be wondering, that is not a bird, it is a TURTLE!!!!!!! 

A TURTLE!!!!!!!  TUR-TLE!!!!!

OK, sorry.  I'm OK now.

We saw lots of these:

White-Faced Ibis

And though this is the only duck species we saw, they were there by the score!

Blue-Winged Teal

Almost every time we go down there, Mom sees a bird she's never seen before, and this trip was no different. Her "lifer" this time:

Marbled Godwit!

Nice beak, don't you think? And check out the ones on these guys:

Long-Billed Dowitchers in front,
photo-bombed by American Avocets

There were lots of egrets down there!

Great Egrets
... or perhaps just some cattails!

Great Blue Heron, Great Egrets, and two Blue-Winged Teals coming in for a landing

Snowy Egrets

Mom was trying to get a shot of that guy on the left, when the other one walked right across her shot. The nerve of some birds!

One last species for you:

Black-Necked Stilt,
doing his Flamingo impression

We saw lots of the adults, but this was the first youngster we've seen:

Black-Necked Stilt puppy!

I love puppies!  Even when they're birdies!

I hope you enjoyed seeing some of Mom's photos.  If you'd like to see more from that trip, please click here to visit our FlickR album.  (It's three pages, and includes a video.)

Have a great weekend!

Cammie!