It's like I've become obsessed. First of all, the sheer number of beautiful and colorful birds, plants, and flowers here is incredible. Oh yeah, I can't leave out the other animals like the iguanas! Second, I am SO happy I decided to bring my mom's digital camera instead of just using my phone for photos. It's a camera I had bought her. Not very expensive but it has a 20x optical zoom! I was pretty excited to try it out and it was definitely an experiment worth doing. The photos are turning out kinda cool if I do say so myself!

We've been doing a lot of relaxing; it's what you do here. But we decided to get out so Lynn and I went on a walk on the other side of the road. David told me where I could find the start of the little road and I think we could have taken it much further than we did but we took so long taking photos of everything an talking to a very nice local man back there, that we didn't get very far. LOL

So I took a ton of photos of flowers and insects and finally scored what I had been trying to get - a worthy photos of the macaws!

They were a big tease all week. You could hear them squawking on their way to fly near the house. I'd jump up every time with my camera hoping to catch them or at last see where they landed. There are so darn many trees that even if you think you hear them nearby, it's hard to tell where they are. I really really want to catch a good photo of them in flight. I got a bare little piece of a photo of one and it's so pretty!

Well this time their rather ugly noise was coming from right in the top of the neighbor's tree. The one with no leaves at the top; great to capture the colorful what-you-normally-only-see-in-cages animal. I'm so glad the neighbor's house it closed up for the season but honestly I probably would have gone over into their yard regardless. And in addition to them being close by, the sky is actually blue for once! Total score.

They have come around pretty close a few more times since then. Enough to have way more photos than I could ever need. But I'm sure I'll have a few hundred more by the time I leave. ;) In fact, oops, I just took a break from writing this to go take pictures of some that landed across the road.

I think I'll make a separate post just for all the leaves and critters I have photos of.