Backyard and Beyond is now accepting donations! If costs several hundred dollars a year to maintain this site, so I’ve put up a donations and tip “jar” feature for anyone who would like to help defray the tab. Thank you for your consideration and attention!

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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…

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There’s a light blue band on this Red-tailed Hawk, in addition to the regular silver band on the other foot. Don’t see many banded hawks around here. The bird was one of three seen at the same time. Blue-banded, upper left, is one of the birds building a nest. The immature bird on lower right…

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Last Friday it was in the mid 70s, the warmest day so far. The sun was out, and so were clouds of what turned out to be small male ants. There were much larger orange somethings in the air as well. Females, as it turned out. I was despairing of photographing any of them when…

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Question Mark. Black-shouldered Drone Fly. Unequal Cellophane Bee. Eastern Carpenter Bee. Andrena genus bee. (There are some 450 species in this genus in North America.) You’ll notice all of the above pictures show the same flowers. Pieris japonica, one of the few things fully blooming currently. Winged male Small Honey Ant. Which is a segue…

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