The Denver Botanical Gardens

Kathleen and I mad a trip to the Denver Botanical Gardens on Presidents day to take advantage of a free day.  The outside gardens were dry and there was not many green plants and no flowers.  This photo shows a typical outdoor shot.

However, inside the Green house there was a wonderful collection of orchids in various colors.  Here are a few samples and if you look closely at the first photo you will find a spider in the cavity of the flower.  I guess this makes a nice hunting ground for him.

And here are a couple more orchids:

All in all it was a nice day.  We met our 2 youngest children at the gardens and had lunch together  and discussed the beauty in the green house.  Kathleen photographed mostly out doors and found a lot of pattern shots.  A few are posted here, but she got into her artist zone and saw patterns everywhere.

We will revisit the trip later and may share a few more photos. 
Thanks for looking

Wild Birds at Red Rocks park

I went for a drive up to Red Rocks Park on Sunday 13th Feb 2011 to take a few photos of the red rocks after a recent snow.  There were a lot of bird feeding in the backyard of the visitors center.  I came across a couple of bird watchers who pointed out a couple of birds that were rare  in the Colorado mountain area. I was able to capture a couple of shot of these rare birds: 
The first was an Eastern Towhee.  

This birds habitat is  generally in the southeastern US east of the Mississippi River.
 The second was the Curved-bill Thrasher.

This birds usual habitat is in Arizona, new Mexico, Texas and northern Mexico
There were also a lot of the ubiquitous Western Scrub Jays.

These guys were all over the place and can be seen various place in the rocky mountain states.  
And in case you were wondering there was a little snow left at the park as seen in this photo:

It was a beautiful day with the temperature in the 60s and lots of sun shine, the snow was melting fast..  This is really amazing, since the previous Tuesday the high temp for the day was 2 degrees F.   The old saying 'if you don't like the weather in Denver, just wait 5 minutes'  was never more true then this week (smile).