Birds Photographed Through a Window – December 2016

December has been a good month for bird observation through my office window. Our bird bath is particularly popular with blue jays. Note the change from the blue-green bowl early in the month to the heated bowl. I’m not sure whether the blue jays are the most frequent visitors, but they are certainly the noisiest.

Both the male and female cardinal stop by almost every day. They make small noises so I usually notice then too.

The mourning doves are quiet…but they are big enough to catch my eye as they swoop down to the deck railing.

All the other birds hide when the red-tailed hawk flies in to perch in the trees at the forest’s edge behind out house. I like to see raptors, but am glad they are not watching my deck all the time!

A white breasted nuthatch visited the bird feeder and did the usual upside down acrobatics to pick out individual seeds.

I saw the Northern Flicker (yellow shafted) – just as I did in November; the bird likes the maple. The yellow on the wing and underneath the tail was clearer in the photograph this month.

The juncos can be aggressive and chase off some of the other birds. The winter here…a long way from where they have their young in the arctic. I wonder what will happen to their numbers as the arctic warms. They are high energy birds all winter long in Maryland.

There are some birds that I see less often (because of the swarms of juncos). I saw a sleepy looking male goldfinch in winter plumage.

A titmouse got a quick sip at the bird bath before a junco flew in.

The Carolina wren is still around to but tends to stay clear when the juncos are around. The bird is not a noisy in the winter as when defending territory in the spring and summer.

I’m enjoying the birds of winter!

Photographs Through a Window – November 2016

November has been a good month for photography through my office window. The crows come to look for things in our gutters.

House finches come for water (this one is a male).

There was a purple finch (female) that visited too – seemingly very nervous.

There were bluebirds too – two days in a row. The second day was colder and the feathers are fluffed to keep the bird warmer.

The Carolina Wren is still around. The noises it makes in the fall are quite different than the spring song.

The bird I got the most excited about was a Northern Flicker (yellow shafted) that was in the maple tree long enough to get several pictures.

The blue jays have been around (very noisy)…but have not settled for long enough for me to photograph.

The squirrel has visited our deck several times and I suspect that the bird feeder is the attraction. It is supposed to be squirrel proof and – so far – has not been dumped. One squirrel figured out how to do it last spring….but so far the area under the feeder has remained free of large amounts of seed.

Usually we do have leaves on the roof --- but the leaves are swirling and it rained, so we have a few that are temporarily stuck: tulip poplar and maple. They dry out soon and be blown away (hopefully not into the gutter).

Photographs through a Window – July 2016

I stopped putting birdseed in our feeder in early July when one of the squirrels got coordinated enough to dump a little seed from it. It wasn’t happening consistently so the ‘squirrel proof’ was not filing totally but enough that I decided they didn’t need the extra food in the summer months. I still go quite a few birds to photograph through my office window. The parent of the juvenile house finches featured in yesterday’s post must have been the birds I saw most frequently around our deck.

This frazzled looking Carolina Wren might be a fledgling from the nest in an old gas grill.

Nuthatches always look alert when they are in their head-down stance. This one was enjoying the last seed I put in the feeder.

There is a male indigo bunting that I see periodically so it might be nesting nearby. I photographed the bird from my office window

Then went downstairs to get a different perspective through the French door in our breakfast area. The mourning dove provides a nice size contrast.

The juvenile cardinal still had some downy looking feathers on its breast and around its head

But its bill has turned the adult color over the past month.

I am keeping our bird bath full of fresh water so I expect that will be the reason birds will continue to visit our deck for the rest of the summer.

The bird on the right is making motions like a chick begging for food – but the one on the left does not look like they will be obliging!

Photographs through a Window – June 2016

The wildlife has been active at the bird feeder and bath on or deck this month. The squirrels empty the seed bowl so quickly that I am not filling it very often. They still come to sniff around periodically – looking for the small windfall from the birds dropping seeds to the deck as the feed at the squirrel-proof hanging feeder.

I like the chipmunks better and cheer when they find the seed first when I fill the bowl. I think the chipmunks have their home under our deck since I see them in that area almost every time I am in the back yard.

The gold finches made a few appearances.

But the house finches are the frequent visitors

As are the chipping sharrows.

I had to be quick to catch the Carolina Wren. This was one was looking for nesting materials so there may be a second brood starting.

There was an occasional white breasted nuthatch on the roof and at the feeder. They are easy to identify at the feeder because they almost always are head down – not on the usually perch.

Not filling the bowl means that the cardinals and the mourning doves don’t get seed as much either since they are too big for the feeder. That caused a particular problem for the cardinal parents. Their baby was very demanding. The male brought it to the deck under the feeder first.

He was looking frazzled from the constant begging by the time they flew away.

The female brought the young bird as well.

The chick was as big as the parents – looked bigger with the fluffiness of the down that had not been quite replaced with ‘grown up’ feathers.

Finally – the young bird appeared on his own under the feeder just yesterday. Do you think it is a male of female? It will become recognizable in the coming weeks. I’ll include the follow up pictures of the bird next month – assuming the young bird keeps coming to our deck.

Learning Log – May 2016

Most of the learning I logged in May was experiential or in conversations with other people. I went to a lecture on wildflowers – the closest I came to a class. The speaker included a segment on buzz pollination, reinforcing what I already knew about it from my son-in-law about the topic. He also pointed out that the jack-in-the-pulpit flowers look the same from the outside but the male and female flowers are quite different inside – but one has to cut away the outer part of the flower to see the structures. Not something I would do!

One area of experiential learning in May was picking strawberries. Years ago when I picked strawberries, I did so on my knees so I was pleasantly surprised that the mounds of my CSA’s strawberry patch made it easier to just bend over to gather the fruit. I’m still enjoying the strawberries I picked.

The other big experience of the month was using the scanner – primarily for old slides, pictures and Zentangle tiles. I learned to use a can of compressed air to clean the dust off periodically and how to scan multiple items at a time (into separate images). I also raised the scanner on a stand so that I didn’t have to bend over slightly each time I loaded it.

There were a lot of factoids I picked up in conversations with other naturalists before field trip hikes:

• Carolina wrens build multiple nests and then the female chooses one (from a birder),
• Earthworms come to the surface during rains not because they are drowning but because they are migrating (from another naturalist that had been reading about it),
• How the ‘points’ of antlers are counted (from a chaperone of a hiking group),
• Inexpensive wire mesh kitchen strainers work great to capture macro-invertebrates in rivers and streams (from a leader of a field trip to the Patapsco River).

Zooming – April 2016

The images I selected for zooming collages this month – all reflect springtime. The Carolina Wren that scouted out nesting locations and selected an old gas grill that we had not gotten around to arranging to take to the landfill (not it won’t go until the wrens are finished with it, the blossoms of a fruit tree and maple samaras…

Horse chestnut leaves, gingko male flowers and leaves, and a daffodil….

Another type of maple samara, a dove in the sunlight, and dogwood flowers….

A goldfinch, robin and bluebird looking a little scruffy (getting their spring/summer plumage) and the beginning of dandelion flowering….

Morning glories and irises from Texas (they had a very mild winter in the Dallas area and lots of rain so the gardens are well developed) ….

A lizard and water lilies (also from Texas).

It’s a vibrant spring and we’re enjoying the cool mornings and near perfect afternoon temperatures in Maryland.

Photographs through a Window – April 2016

The juncos are still around but there at not as many of them at the feeder recently. Some may have already left for their nesting ground further north. A Carolina Wren has visited several times.  It is full of song either from the railing of the deck or atop the weather station. The birds always seem to sing facing the forest (the daffodils that are blurs of yellow in the background of the photo series are at the edge of the forest). By mid-month, this bird had built a nest in our old (unused) gas grill.

Sometimes brown-headed cowbirds come to our deck. There was a pair that seemed more interested in glaring at each other at first.

Then they noticed the bird feeder and

Patiently took turns getting a snack (when they both were on the feeder the seed was blocked by the same mechanism that makes the feeder squirrel proof).

During the latest (maybe last) snow flurry of the season, some mourning doves visited the bird bath. They fluffed their feathers against the cold.

The one sitting with its tail in the water seemed be totally unaware. Maybe there are not nerves in tail feathers?

The cardinals are still about. I hear them singing more that I see them. It’s the time of year that the male stakes out his territory. In this picture you can see that the buds on the sycamore are beginning to enlarge.

I couldn’t resist collecting these pictures of a dove from a few days later. The red line on the beak almost give the bird a smile. The different positions on the eyelid almost gives the impression of coyness (upper left) and smugness (upper right). The middle one just looks to me like the bird is ready for anything.

Now for another dove mating. It happened in about the same place on our deck railing as the one in February that I posted about shortly afterwards (here). Perhaps the time has come to start on a second brood. The slide show below was taken last week. This time a pair of birds flew to the railing. On started grooming (1) then walked away along the railing toward the bird bath (2). Another arrived with fluffed feathers (3). The smaller one approach and the feather’s fluffed even more (4). A lot of grooming of the larger bird ensues (5-10). They ‘kiss’ (11-14). They mate (15). They cuddle (16). They separate and the female preens (17-20). The female walk past the male stepping on his tail (21). The female flies way and the male chases away the bird that had originally arrived with the female (and had watched the action from other side of the deck) before flying away himself.