Painted Clouds and Dueling Hawks... A Surreal Cloverdale Day...

Sending out greetings to all my wonderful, gorgeous and intelligent Gather friends from here at Jeanz Place in Cloverdale, Northern California...

It seemed to me like there was some kind of "nature magic" at work around here today...

First:

I had gone outside in the early afternoon because I heard the nearby call of one of the hawks... I dashed up to the top of the hill behind the house where there are no trees to block the view and searched the sky for it...

I was distracted at first by the clouds, though... They were very unusual today... They looked as though someone had "dabbled" them onto a bright blue canvas and then dipped their brush in some thinner and "smeared" them across the sky...

Do you see the little "trails" of vapor falling down from each of them? That's what I meant by "smeared"...

Just then the mated pair of harrier hawks flew quickly right over my head. Unfortunately, I couldn't focus the camera in on them, though, in time to get a shot...

I didn't see much else happening, so I took one more (wider angled) shot of the strange clouds before returning to the house:

I went back outside about 2 hours later but, this time, I was able to locate the red-tailed hawk in the sky immediately... He was way up there (maybe 200 or 300 feet in the air) -- almost motionless -- as though he was "pinned" to that spot in the sky:

Then he would slowly dip one of his wings, just slightly, turn, go to another spot in the sky and stay "pinned" there for a while...

I took several shots of him:

Then, I saw one of the harrier hawks approach from the northeast -- flying directly toward the red-tail:

To my amazement, he dive-bombed the red-tail several times -- chasing him across the sky:

He chased him until they were out of sight...

That's when I turned and saw the sunset -- it was breathtaking! It seems as though I remember seeing a Van Gough painting one time that looked very similar to this:

I took several shots of the sunset from slight different angles using slightly different settings on my camera:

But this next one was the very best one, I thought...

I hope you enjoyed the photos, my friends... Thanks so much for the company today! :^D

luv,

jean