Got up around 6:00 this morning and took the dog over to the WPA Rock Garden for a walk.

I walked us down to the duck pond first to see if there were any ducklings or goslings around.  We saw one lovely gosling, getting big but still in its baby fluff, with its family, and then saw three mama Mallard ducks with big broods of chicks (most of them were hatchlings – just balls of fluff – but one brood was starting to fledge already).  One of the mamas sat right along the edge of the pond, with her wings and feathers all pooched out to cover her babies.  When she stood up, the little ones seemed to “pour” out from under her, almost a dozen of them.  So cute.  Another mama also had about 9 ducklings.  Big broods this year!  The babies move so quickly, though, it’s hard to get photos of them.  I did manage to get quite a few, though.  Just I was starting to walk away from the pond and head toward the garden, I caught a glimpse of a Belted Kingfisher, and managed to get two decent shots of him before he flitted away again…

I also got a few good shots of bumblebees, honey bees, and Carpenter bees around the garden.  It was still cool outside, so they were just waking up and a little sluggish.  One bumblebee stopped to take long drinks of nectar, so I got some photos of his fuzzy body that turned out pretty good…

In the garden, the flowers and thistles were all stretching and blooming… but I was sad to see so horrid vandalism had taken place.  One of the master gardeners was there taking pictures of the damage.  Vandals had torn their fruiting cactus to pieces and carved huge holes in some of the paddles; ripped out entire plants and native grasses and thrown them all over the place; and uprooted, shredded and killed an olive tree.  Just horrendous.  I don’t understand how anyone can do anything like that.  What do they get out of it?  The gardener said there was nothing he could do for the torn up stuff except make mulch out of them.  I said, “They should make mulch out of the people who did this,” and he said, “Yeah.  At least then they’d be doing something useful.”  So sad…

I was going to continue our walk over to the smallest pond, and then onto the larger one, but was thwarted by the fact that the smallest pond had been drained so one side of it could be repaired (so nothing to see there), and the larger pond was blocked off because the park was holding some kind of an event there today.  Sigh.  So our walk was cut short, and we headed back home.