Thanksgiving 2009

The holidays, which we have always anticipated and loved, have been a real struggle for the last few years. First our daughter married and moved away, then both of my parents died. We have have gone from being an big group of people to share them with to only the three of us. Austin suggested today that we need to start some new traditions to make up for the loss and absence of those we love. He even volunteered to cook some of the things that were Gran's specialites! One thing Jim and I have been doing is going up to the wildlife preserve in Muleshoe on Christmas Day. The preserve is where many thousands of sandhill and whooping cranes winter. This time we decided to go today, on Thanksgiving. It was fairly cool and the sun was out. We could see more and more sandhill cranes grazing in the fields as we got closer to Muleshoe.

This shot is for my cousin Paul--who didn't believe it was flat on the Texas plains--THIS Paul is a hill.

This is the platform at the lake--called Paul's Lake. It is about a mile across the lake where all the cranes gather. With binoculars you can see the cranes across the lake from the platform.
This is probably several hundred cranes. My camera will zoom x25 but it still was not close enough to get a good picture of the cranes. The noise they make is a cooing sound, but with so many together is it very loud.

Skye loved running in the high grass. She zigzagged through it like she was chasing a rabbit. Then she would turn around to make sure we were watching.For one second she was still enough for me to get this picture with the sun behind her.

On the way out I was going to get some pictures of prairie dogs. They had been sitting out everywhere when we drove in. However the sun had gone down just enough that the temps had started to drop. They were all tucked snuggly in their holes--so I just got a picture of the hole.

The cotton had been picked and put into the modules ready to go to the gin. These looked kind of odd, I don't know if some of the cotton was dirty or they got alot of trash when they harvested.Then it just wouldn't be West Texas without a pretty sunset. I always thought that Texas should have been called Big Sky country--because we don't have any mountains to obstruct the view of the sunsets.
Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!