The fauna I saw in Arizona

   Last March 27-31, I went to Arizona (I'm just now getting caught up with the posts I wanted to share because of taxes, family visiting for Easter, entertaining groups at my home, etc).
  I was so excited to go- I was musing about all wonderful rock outcrops that I would get to see, and forgot about the fauna. I didn't think there would be a lot of  fauna in the Arizona dessert so I was surprise to see as much as I did.  Everything I saw excited me because I knew it was wild animals living in harmony with the the things around it.  Usually I scare things away before I can get a picture but these creatures were pretty use to humans and didn't run away as much.  I've made the connections to Wikipedia when I could recall what I was looking at. I wished I had a notebook to write down what I was seeing when I saw it.  I was able to take some photo's and here they are:

Mountain Cottontail rabbit

 The first thing I saw was a Mountain_Cottontail rabbit.

Horned Owl

 We saw this  Horned Owl   staked out in the same tree the whole time we were visiting the Boulders.

Wild boars (Javelia's - I could be spelling this wrong since it is a Spanish word)

  I couldn't believe it when a family of Wild boarsWild boar ran if front of me.

Baby Wild Boar poking its head from behind a cactus.

 If you look really closely behind the barrel cactus there is a baby poking its head out.

The rest of the pack trying to catch up with the other Wild Boars.

There always has to be one straggler in every group.  This one finally did catch up with others while stopping to eat a couple of times.

Mallard ducks

 We even saw some wild Mallard_ducks.  Which amazed me because I just don't think of mallards being in the desert, since they like water so much.

Gambel  Quail

While we were waiting for our lunch to arrive we had a pair of Gambel Quail come join us.  It was fun to watching them.  It was obvious they had been feed before and were looking for tidbits to munch on.

Gambel Quail

  Lunch came and the quail left.  But it wasn't long before we had other birds join us.

I'm not sure what this bird is.  It reminds me of a swallow in its size.

 Here a different bird, - not sure what it is either.  Could be a swallow or a wren? All I know is that it was very interested in what we were eating.  It kept on hopping around trying to get our attention (which it did).

I just wonder if this maybe an  Albert Towhee   because of its brown plumage and dark head. The thing is they are suppose to be very rare, and skidish around people which these birds definitely were not.

Possible Arizona night lizard.

 I even saw some lizards. The lizard is centered on the boulder next to the prickly pear cactus. I was more interested in the crystalline structure of the boulder when I noticed the lizard and decided to take its picture too.  This one I saw was during the day so I wondered if it could be a  Arizona night lizard.  I looked under common lizards but they are found in Europe and Asia and not North America.  Also the brown lizard is part of the iguana family and this didn't have a head that looked like an iguana.

Squirrel viewing the Grand Canyon too, at Bright Angle point.

 And at the Grand Canyon I saw this squirrel.  I tried to take its picture but it ran off before I could get a better one.  I was just glad I got this.

I did see some other things like,  humming birds, mule deer, regular mules, toads, wood peckers, and cactus wrens but they were way too fast for me to get their photos. 
There is one thing I did not see and I was glad of that.  It's rattle snakes.  Some of the other people we where with had that honor and even got pictures to prove it. 

I had such a wonderful time seeing all this fauna.  To be honest all I thought I would see would be jack rabbits,  lizards, horses, cattle and snakes.   I was amazed I didn't see what I thought I would see, and ended up seeing what I did.

In the next couple of weeks I plan to post more on this trip, I started with this one because it was so easy to figure out what pictures to use.  I took so many pictures now it's hard to decide what to write about next. So while I am musing on the next set, have a great day.

I tried to crop the pictures but haven't figured it out yet.  Here's my musings on that-  when I crop it in the camera, then when I import it to the computer, the computer program I have doesn't recognize the file and won't let me open the crop picture up while the unedited stuff comes out fine.  I don't have a cropping feature on my computer under my files.  I can do simple edits, change colors,  write on it but can't crop  That's because the computer tech that set up this computer used the student edition on things saying I would never need anything more sophisticated than a student version.  Boy was he wrong and I'm stuck with what I have until we get a new computer.  So now I've gone to some free photo editing spots like Walmart, the trouble is because of my computer again it won't recognize the files and I can't open them up or copy the edited pictures once I've done that.  I like Walmart's stuff because I can get hard prints made that I can then scan into the computer, but that takes a lot of time and also costs money to do. One of these days I'll figure out how to crop some of these pictures and when I do I will replace them.

Going over some pictures there was one more animal that I saw.  A Mourning Dove  Its not very focus but I am going to include it too since it is part of the fauna I saw.
Finally I also have to add this one:

I liked the way these rabbits were obeying the rules