Leroy, New York

I think that I got told a bit ago that I was not doing what I should be doing with this blog. There was a phone call to my wife in which it was said that since there had not been anything written for a while the caller was concerned about us. At least I took the message to tell me to write. I have been thinking that I should do it anyway.

We are staying in a camp ground near Leroy, New York, which is about twenty miles from Rochester. That is not the same place as LeRoy, New York, which is suburb of Buffalo. How a state managed to get two cities with so extremely close names is a mystery to me. There may be very similar names in ever state that I don't know about. There are a lot of trees in this camp and therefore there are a lot of birds. There is one small bird here that I cannot identify. It is about the size of a common sparrow and it spends some time with the sparrows. Whatever it is there only seems to be the one bird. I have never seen two of them. I have really wondered if it could be color mutation of some sort. A couple years ago we were in a camp where one sparrow had a white head like an American Bald Eagle. It looked like it was cross between an eagle and a sparrow. Other than its head it was exactly like all the other sparrows with which it flocked. Erma and I find ourselves looking for this one bird because it is so unusual.


THE WHITE BIRD IN OUR CAMPGROUND

There is a lot of other wildlife in this area. I have seen more groundhogs around Rochester than I have seen in my entire life. Some of them are right on the campus of the Rochester Institute of Technology. The thing that amazes me about RIT is that they claim that there are over two hundred deer that live on the campus grounds. At one time the whole area was a swamp so there is still plenty of tree areas and some swamp that remains. We have seen a lot of the deer from time to time. At least two of the does have twin fawns. We have also seen some more twin fawns by the highway near our campground.


A DOE AND FAWN ON THE RIT CAMPUS

The weather here in Rochester continues to be cool and rainy. We heard last nigh that so far this July has been the coolest on record, and the records have been kept for 139 years. This morning is bright and sunny. So today is a beautiful day. Yesterday started out that same way but in the afternoon the rains came in again. We did not get a lot of hard rain but I guess that some places did. I get reports that where we stay in Texas the weather has been totally different. Temperatures well over a hundred and no rain at all. In Colorado where I spent forty years I was not used to as many cloudy days as there are here where I am now and the temperatures were a lot milder than where I am spending my winters. When a person get used to one particular climate it is easy to forget that there is such a difference in other areas.

Till Later this is Uncle Duck