Saturday, January 5, 2008

Birds in Our Backyard

My first bird for 2008 was a red-bellied woodpecker. Tom went out this afternoon and took some photos near the deck at our bird feeders. He used the Canon 40D with MY Canon 500mm f4 IS lens...

We have had 4 kinds of "woodpeckers" in our yard for the past 3 years (Hairy, Downey, red-bellied and yellow shafter flickers). This winter we gained a fifth with the yellow-bellied sapsucker.

The black capped chickadees are not at all shy and will even stay at the feeder when I go out to fill it. They love it when I open the bathroom window and scare away the squirrels, they don't move as the dozen squirrels scamper off and happily fly right down for a nut.


We always have lots of juncos too. Here is a male and a female.

The carolina wrens nested on our front door last year. I had left a grapevine wreath up last March when we went away for ten days to Florida. When I came home there was a nest in the wreath. I carefully moved the wreath to the wall next to the front door (the front door was the "back" of their nest) and we were treated with seeing them hatch and fledge 4 babies. I would come home from work every afternoon and put put meal worms for them. Tom put out some dried meal worms and they were quite happy today. I think that they remembered...



Coppers Hawk gets dove

I heard a loud thwack the week before Christmas and ran upstairs and saw this Cooper's Hawk with a morning dove in its talons. Cool! It was still moving. Here are two grab shots through the window. You can see the bird in its talons in the first photo.