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Spring flourishes
Blue-gray gnatcatcher My daughter was excited to spot this tiny bird making its buzzing call as it foraged among the leaves. It seemed never to be either still nor silent, but it was a treat to see.
We also saw a number of yellow-rumped warblers, a palm warbler, and more ruby-crowned kinglets.
Palm warbler 
Ruby-crowned kinglet A swallow watched us, his mate a few feet away on the fence.
On a walk yesterday, we looked hopefully at the pileated woodpecker nest cavity we watched last year. To our surprise, a bird was peering out — but it wasn’t a pileated woodpecker. It was a northern flicker! I’m not sure if it was resting or trying on the nest for size.
Northern flicker We saw a few other beauties on our walk as well, from various instances of dead-wood art….
…to may apples unfurling their umbrellas.
These are just the things I was able to get pictures of, but among the other sights that have pleased us lately are the brown thrasher we saw “gardening” in the dirt under our bird feeder this morning, the fox that ran beside us for awhile on our bird watching jaunt, and the turkey that startled up and flew away in the brush nearby (nesting?). It’s a great time of year because every few days there is something new popping out of the ground or into the treetops.
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Glory of the Snow
Not sure how I’ve missed these lovely little flowers interspersed among the grass in various lawns around and about, but I’ve noticed it this year. It’s called chionodoxa, poetically nicknamed Glory of the Snow.
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Killdeer
Mollie, the first border collie I bought after graduation from college, used to love to chase these swooping, screeching little birds. But in all the walks I took with her, she never caught one, and I never got this close to one.
This one’s for you, Mollie.
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Kinglets
Ruby-crowned kinglets: the males have a visible red crest. -
Happy
This makes me happy: two chickadees setting up housekeeping in our chickadee house. We put it up last year and nobody used it. This year it apparently makes the grade for these two! We’re going to call them Chuck and Dee Dee.
Saw our first yellow-rumped warblers today:
Mister 
Mrs As well as this elusive chipping sparrow.
Also saw some fiddleheads!
We found a second hawk nest to monitor on our way to the marsh. I caught a flutter of wings and a flash of red in some trees beside the road, looked more closely, and saw it was a red-tailed hawk lighting on a branch beside a stick nest. It’s the second twiggy mass we’ll be keeping an eye on!
Red-tail pair -
Eagle’s Nest
My father-in-law took the girls and me to see something really neat yesterday: an eagle’s nest!
It was overcast and VERY windy, and we saw the male come in trying to negotiate the winds. He perched in a nearby tree. The female and one chick were in the nest the whole time. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to see them again, and maybe we’ll see them do an exchange or feeding at the nest.
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A few more spring sights
Here are a few more photos taken on our walk yesterday.
These guys remind me of those two old men in the balcony on “The Muppet Show.” 
A tadpole soaking up the sun. It never moved in the ten minutes I was there. 
Salamanders mating. 
Good day, Mr. Frog! 
Power-lounging squirrel. The squirrels are going to be bummed when I put the birdbath back on this base! Not captured on film were the three kingfishers flying and rattling vocally over the pond. I’m not sure if it was courtship behavior or territorial behavior, but they weren’t fishing, and they were pretty indifferent to the various humans around the edges of the pond. Swallows were diving and circling. At one point a Cooper’s hawk flew over, making a speedy path toward a racket of small birds beyond the pond.
One young man was playing his guitar on the boardwalk — adding his song to the spring peepers, honking geese and rattling kingfishers. That’s not something you can do with a piano, more’s the pity. It was nice — a human sound that blended well with all the natural sounds.
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Ruby-crowned Kinglet
You have to be looking pretty carefully to see a bird this small. It was high up in the treetops, bark-colored, a mere flicker of movement now and then that could just as easily have been dead leaves fluttering. It looked like this.
(That’s on full zoom.) Yet my daughters spotted it.
On the way back to the car, each thought the other had spotted it first. But we all marveled to have seen it at all — a female ruby-crowned kinglet. My husband and I saw some the other day for the first time, but only fleetingly, mostly hidden in the brush. “In that whole forest of trees,” Older Daughter reflected, “how amazing is it that we happened to look in the right spot to see her?”
There’s always an element of grace when you go for a walk — small gifts that open your eyes to something new. Tonight as I fall asleep I’ll be thinking of this tiny fragment of life, busy among the branches, making her long trek northward for the summer. Another instance of a species I could have lived my whole life and never known was there if we hadn’t been looking.
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Palm Warbler
This morning it was 37 degrees and overcast. The very last thing I would have expected was to see a warbler. Second-to-last would be sunshine.
I saw both!
This was probably my most successful photo shoot ever, because I was actually patient. I didn’t get up and move around trying to get closer to the bird. It meant waiting awhile and experiencing some of the other pleasures of being there — birdsong, a pileated woodpecker laughing, ducks. It also meant this little bird was not disturbed and didn’t change its normal activity as a result of my intrusion.
In fact, I’m pretty sure it took a bird-nap at one point. Its tail stopped flicking and it sat still for perhaps five minutes. That’s pretty relaxed!
I didn’t get any good pictures of palm warblers last year, so this is a great start to the spring warbler season.
In a separate jaunt today with my husband and the girls, we saw ruby-crowned and golden-crowned kinglets and a possible red-tail’s nest to monitor. All in all it was a great day!
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Daffodils
