Tortoise update and wildflower primer

"There she is, Miss America..." Actually the song I keep singing to tortoise #2 is "Come out come out wherever you are..." As you can see (I hope you can see), she is alive and moving, and we did not have to poke her. We found a good stick, got down on our hands and knees in the tortoise pen, shone a flashlight down the burrow -- and there she was, looking at us! She's about halfway up the burrow in this picture -- still too far down for us to reach, but definitely closer than she was last night.

So I took a few flash pictures of her (I'm actually holding the camera down into the burrow and snapping blindly), we sprayed a little water down in the burrow to give her a taste of what she could have if she'd come out, and she promptly turned around and went back down. Oops.

So tomorrow we're going to see if she tries again (and there will be NO flash photography and NO sprays of water), but if she doesn't come all the way out, we'll probably dig her out. Then she can have a bath and start waking up a little more. The other tortoise had a nice day today, walked all over the pen and ate some green leaves.

As promised, here are some wildflowers! I finally managed to bring my camera on a morning walk. This was actually taken in our front yard. The yellow flowers are desert dandelions and the little purple flowers are red stem filaree.

This is a fairly common one, not so pretty, but we can't all be beautiful. It's called fiddleneck.

I'm pretty sure this is pygmy-leaved lupine. It's also fairly common in the field near us.

This one is not at all common out here. It's called blue dicks and is found all over the state, but from the pictures I've seen, it's usually much fluffier and prettier elsewhere. This must be the desert version -- small, drab. Figures. I think it's nice, though. Grows from a bulb.

And here we have the tiny yellow flower called goldfields, because they appear to turn fields gold. (Lots of desert dandelions are mixed in there too.)

I will post more photos as we find more flowers. I love this time of year.