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Winter Work
Water, water everywhere, but most of it frozen solid. The snow under the bird feeders is littered with food. The bare patches, under trees or cleared by the cemetery crew, are scoured. There’s always the road, too, especially under sweet gums. Ground-huggers are suddenly found in the branches, gleaning.
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Parrots
I spotted twenty-nine Monk Parrots yesterday, several blocks from their colony. They were eating the buds of callery pear trees. A lot of the buds were clipped off and fell. The birds descended to the road to eat them.
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Tongue, Fur, Ivy
This Red-tailed Hawk was rubbing its bill on this trunk when this photo captured a bit of hawk-tongue hanging out. Nearby, a squirrel was being very quite in a thicket of poison ivy that extends off this pine like so much witchy hair.
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Redpolls!
A half-dozen tiny-billed Common Redpolls energetically flitted all over this American sweetgum the other day in Green-Wood. Not much bigger than the sweetgum pods themselves, the birds needled out the tiny seeds within. I haven’t seen one of these boreal finches in many a year. With the light and the pond, over which this sweetgum…
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Some more birds
Those may be Downy Woodpecker holes in this hanging dead branch. Cooper’s Hawk at the top of this mass of pigeons. Common Raven flying with nesting material, twig, broken off a tree about a block from this blog’s command post. Other member of the pair hung around in the tree for a while before dropping…
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Raptor Wednesday
Same Cooper’s? Could be. First picture from last Wednesday, second picture a day earlier. (We had a good bit of snow.) Definitely not the same Cooper’s. This is an adult is perched on the same fire escape as the juvenile pictured first above and below. This fire escape is a few yards (quite literally back…
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Local Birds
A cloacal-eye view, so to speak, of Tufted Titmouse. What’s with the tail? There’s some suggestion on the innernets that this results from cramped overnight roosting conditions, where several birds will pile up in a hole in a tree to huddle for warmth. The brighter White-throated Sparrows (see below) usually get all the attention. Same…
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Marsupial Monday
I heard this before I saw it. I thought the sound was sourced by White-throated Sparrows kicking dry, loose leaves out of the way as they foraged. My first glimpse of the light-colored fur had me thinking a feral cat was coming this way. But no, it was Didelphis virginiana. I think because I was…
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Backyard and Beyond 