Birds
-
This morning
-
Baltimore Oriole
This handsome fellow turned up yesterday. Talk about sticking out like a sore thumb! He certainly brightened up a drab day with a splash of brilliant color.
I’ve put out some orange slices in an old suet cage, but he hasn’t been back — yet.
-
Killdeer Nest
Mrs. Killdeer tried hard to lure us away from her nest with her broken wing routine. My husband is the one who spied these eggs, camouflaged though they are among the other stones.
I’ve seen a red fox twice at the other end of the airport from this nest. I hope he doesn’t find it. It’s always with mixed feelings that I become aware of a bird’s nest. There are so many strikes against them — predators and tromping people especially. I’ll check back in a week or so to see if these eggs are still there.
-
Yellow Warbler
What a treat to see this yellow warbler this morning — first of the season!
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
