Second Crop

As noted earlier, there's a second crop of turkeys and quail growing up on the American River trail. We saw one of the turkey chicks today--still a bit fuzzy, but already a good six inches high. It was growing into that ill-defined border territory between cute and ugly. A few days ago, though, we saw the unmistakably cute--a flock of maybe twenty quail chicks that couldn't have been more than a couple of days old. Would that I had a camera! They still had all their newly hatched fuzz, complete with the racing stripes running down the sides. We saw the same flock two days later, and they had all grown a centimeter taller, all of it in the legs. The looked like giant dust-bunnies perched on matchsticks, only very very cute.

updated 23 July--There are reports that fuzzy turkey chicks are definitely citizens of the land of cute when they are back-lit by morning sun as they stumble across the bike trail.