Nature's beauty and coyote behavior

It's a rare phase in my life when I don't even bother to look at all of the photos that I've taken recently - but that's what has happened over the past week. Just today, I opened the photos from the day that we found out the recent bad news about K.

What an absolutely gorgeous world. I started my mountain bike ride that morning in the dark, before sunrise. As I rode, the eastern sky lit up. What incredible beauty!

Soon after that, the sun crested the eastern hills, and I turned off my powerful helmet-mounted light.

That morning, I did an extremely early morning ride by myself, before returning home to pick up K for a short jaunt after the world was light. It was a glorious day in the mountains.

Shortly after our bike rides, we headed to Colorado State Vet School for K's appointment. Despite our reason for going down to the flatlands, I enjoyed seeing the burst of springtime that adorned every corner of the lower-elevation world. I took this photo while K was in the hospital getting xrays taken.

Sometimes, I find it incredible that the natural world can still be so beautiful no matter what ugly things are going on in our lives.

Recently, the Duo and I have been enjoying our sunset hikes. The angle of the sun as it sets at this time of year paints our world with an incredible warm glow. I like getting photos of the Duo together but R doesn't believe in looking even remotely in the direction of the camera.

Do you think that R can stretch any further upward without levitating?

K heard me trying to convince R to pay just a little attention to me, and she shot me a glance. Her look seemed to say "Little Brothers!" with great exasperation.

Often, on our evening hike, we'll check a trail camera along the way. As my longtime readers know, I am fascinated with wildlife behavior. I use "trail cameras", which are triggered by motion, to capture photos of the animals going through their normal routines. I have a bobcat story that I'll save for tomorrow. Today it's the coyotes.

We have a breeding pair who walk past our house regularly. This is the female.

And, this is the male. He's the one with the injury to his face, below his left eye. He's now had the injury for more than a month, and it doesn't look worse - which I think is good news. It shows up as a dark patch under his left eye.

Near the coyote "normal route", a rabbit has triggered my camera on many occasions.

You can probably guess the next event... The poor bunny became a coyote meal. I found myself wondering if this was the male or female coyote (I can only tell based on the facial injury to the male) and whether the pair share a meal like this one. I wish that I could have seen what happened next.

Gulp. I just realized that this carnage occurred on Easter Sunday. I sure hope that wasn't the Easter Bunny.

I've also been capturing photos of the "single" coyotes who are also part of the pack. This guy looks young to me. He'll probably help raise the coyote pups that the breeding pair will deliver sometime in the next month or so. He'll "help" by bringing food to the mother when she's nursing. Later, when the pups are bigger, he'll babysit when the mother goes out hunting. He looks cute and very fuzzy in this photo.

It's so nice to see our world coming to life again after months of very little wildlife activity. There's another snowstorm on the horizon so the animals need to make hay now!