mthew

The weather has been fluctuating. Days in the 50s aren’t very bug friendly, but once we start hitting the sunny 60s, they emerge. Did you know you can help maintain the cost of keeping this blog going?

Rusty Blackbird (Euphagus carolinus). This is, or better say was, a common species, but the birds have “undergone one of the sharpest and most mystifying recent declines of any North American songbird.” Here’s more information from the Rusty Blackbird Working Group. I reported this sighting on eBird. This male, forging on the edge of Green-Wood’s…

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Yes, two. Grazing on the grass. Wrestling. Running at the sound of approaching cars, but fairly blasé about bipeds nearby. Donations.

Uh-oh. Trouble. This Red-tailed Hawk cached the remains (Gray Squirrel, I think) in this Atlas cedar. I saw the bird fly in empty-taloned, clamber up a limb, and only then start in on the retrieved leftovers. Backyard and Beyond is now accepting donations! If costs several hundred dollars a year to maintain this site, so…

Lots of little Golden-crowned Kinglets. A single Palm Warbler. The first warbler I’ve seen this spring. And here’s my second. Pine Warbler. Pair or Ring-necked Ducks. Competitive nesting. Not exactly camouflage.

This Eastern Phoebe had just eaten a cellophane bee. This male Red-bellied Woodpecker would not stop chortling about the nesting hole he’d made. Ah, well, when you’re a Carolina Wren, you just chortle, don’t you? A trio of Tree Swallows and a Barn Swallow. Temperatures were below freezing yesterday. And the swallows seemed very chill.

Grey Squirrel gnawing on a bone. You know, one of those bones you find downslope from the road where the garbage piles up…. I suspect this is like the recycling of deer antlers by mice and other mammals in the forest. Going for the calcium? This may well be the nesting female seen earlier this…