Day 3 – Dead Horse Ranch, AZ

Today Rob indulged me by going to Dead Horse Ranch which is now a state park.

Having been there before I knew that there was good birding and a nice place to walk.

It consists of lots of open lands right by a stream and it has some wonderful camp grounds. Nice drive through campsites for RV’s.

There is also three ponds that you can walk around and last time we were here there were lots of ducks, grebes and coots, but there was only one solitary grebe out on the water.

The land wasn’t any more productive but I did get some pictures of a black and say’s phoebe.

By the car, there was a long-tailed grackle and I noticed that it wasn’t using a foot. Seems like it had gotten tangled in some fishing line and it’s foot was swollen. We were talking to someone that was fishing and they called in the forest ranger.

As the bird could still fly it was hard to catch but it would come down to the ground if you threw down a chip or two.

They finally went and got a live trap and we donated the chips and we’re hoping that they were able to catch it and take off the line.

We drove around the campsites and then went down to the picnic area and walked along the river.

Lots of walking which is nice and I got a bit of a burn on my nose today as I had left my hat at the motel.

From there we headed back towards Camp Verde and Rob saw a sign that said Black Canyon so we headed down the gravel road. We ended up at the Verde river and as we got out of the car we could hear something that sounded like a hive of wasps.

Looking around we couldn’t see anything and headed down the path to the water only to find that the noise we heard was from a drone that a man (Danny as we found out later) was operating one.

Had a interesting talk with him about his hobby and what you can and cannot do with drones. There is quite a lot of restrictions and finds here in the US which seem a little more strict than Canada.

Did you know you can put a no-fly zone over your property that needs to be respected? It’s called geofencing.

From Danny had told us about a spot where he use to live called Clear Water, so we headed down that way and you could walk along this wonderful clear stream.

But before we got there, as we really didn’t know where we were going again (no map) we stopped at another park and walked down to a stream where we could hear some birds but the only thing we could see was a lizard that hopped.

As we had done so much walking today through the woods along the water, tonight we headed to the Casino for dinner and fun.

Dinner was okay, nothing to write home about, and the gambling was fun. We were up $70 at one time but ended up down $70. Ah well, we had fun.

It was a lazy day just hanging around the area and tomorrow we are off travelling.

I’ll let you know where we end up tomorrow.

It’s just about midnight here, and I’m off to bed.