I've been riding my bike to work quite a bit lately. I rode Monday and Tuesday, but not today. One thing I've noticed is that there's a large amount of wildlife loitering around the area not far from my house. During a normal bike ride I see herons, rabbits (cottontail and jack), geese, pelicans, muskrats, quail, sandpipers, a variety of ducks and much more. Today I saw some strange birds that look sort of like sandpipers, but were white and had red heads. I need to get a field guide to help me figure it out. Yesterday I found a new deposit of marmots and spent about 10 minutes observing them observe me.

That's not all that happened yesterday! I took Mira Loma (the part that goes behind Rattlesnake Mountain) yesterday so that I could get the Indiana Jones Fortress of Doom cache on the way. Other than the inordinate number of spiders with webs between the brush on the way up, the hike was fairly uneventful. I found the cache in the grueling wind and began making my way down. Once I was off the main hill and out of the rocks I thought I was in the clear; however, this was a false assumption. I heard the joyful sound of a rattle right next to me, which caused me to take a good leap forward. Looking back I saw a rattlesnake in the grass - it's head probably within a foot of where I had just stepped. It must have been a lazy snake because it didn't coil and didn't strike. It just kind of continued on its way as if I wasn't there. Nevertheless, I didn't get much closer, but took the following picture:

That got my heart pumping pretty good, but the real fun part was finishing the bike ride home. The wind was blowing so hard that I had to pedal to go downhill - the one part of the ride where you get to be lazy. A series of wrong turns (looking for shortcuts) and misjudgements turned a casual ride home into a 3-hour long adventure. It was a good workout, though!

Anyway, there's so many crazy animals around here that I sometimes feel like Snow White - except that the animals don't flock to me when I sing.