Aerial Acrobats

There is a huge pine tree across the street from us, and every year since we bought our house, a pair of Osprey have nested there and raised their chicks. They sure can be noisy critters, but we do like watching them and seeing their young as they grow up.

Yesterday morning Miss Terry told me that apparently the young ones are starting to fly, and it looks like the parents were giving them some pointers. It was a fantastic show of aerial acrobatics, and I went outside with Terry’s camera and took a few pictures.

Well, that’s not exactly true, I took a bunch of pictures.

Unfortunately, I’m not nearly as good a photographer as Miss Terry, so even though I took a bunch of pictures, many of them were out of focus, or the birds were halfway out of the frame, and things like that. But I still managed to get a few. They were darting and swooping low, then flying high and soaring on the thermals, just having a great time. I’ve been to a lot of military airshows and I don’t think many of them were any more interesting to watch.

Of course, it’s not all fun and games when you’re an Osprey raising chicks. I don’t know if you can tell it or not, but this one has a fish or something in its claws that it’s bringing back to the nest.

That reminded me of the time I walked out to the mailbox a couple of years ago and heard something hit the ground behind me. I turned around to see a large fish lying there and wondered where the hell that came from because our house is 800 yards from the water. Then I heard an Osprey squawking overhead and looked up to see it circling and realize that it had dropped dinner on the way home to the nest. I went back inside and watched, and sure enough, within a couple of moments, it swooped down and grabbed it and was gone.

Besides watching the Osprey, most of yesterday was spent writing, and I knocked out another 6,500 words in my new Big Lake book. That brings me to almost 19,000 words since I started it last Sunday. It’s moving right along. Speaking of books, my latest one, The Road To Wrinkle Ranch, is doing well on Amazon and starting to get more reviews coming in. At midnight last night it was #826 on all of Amazon, and #30 on Amazon’s list of Hot New Releases in the mystery category, sharing the page with such well known authors as John Sandford, David Baldacci, Harlan Coben, James Patterson, and Lee Child.   Thank you to everybody who read it and shared it with their friends, to those of you who left reviews, and everybody who supports what I do. You guys make all the effort worthwhile.

Be sure to enter our latest Free Drawing. This week’s prize is an audiobook of Gone The Next, the first book in my friend Ben Rehder’s Roy Ballard mystery series. Ben is another of my favorite authors, and if you aren’t a fan yet, you will be after reading any of his books.  To enter, click on this Free Drawing link or the tab at the top of this page and enter your name (first and last) in the comments section at the bottom of that page (not this one). Only one entry per person per drawing please, and you must enter with your real name. To prevent spam or multiple entries, the names of cartoon or movie characters are not allowed. The winner will be drawn Sunday evening.

Thought For The Day – A happy marriage combines the very best of what you have with the very best of what someone else has, to create endless joy.?