I posted that picture to my local community FB group recently. Someone commented, “your ancestors are telling you you’re on the right path”, which gave me a smile.
It is always a gift when animals let us see them in their majesty. And I bet you aren’t too bothered by pesky, meddlesome rabbits much either.
So I’d figured it was a boy hawk because the bird was large and so showy, deep orange shoulders and bright stripes on the wings and tail. Now wiki tells me both girl and boy Red-shoulder hawks are showy, and in fact the females are larger than the males. Ignorance self-fought. Possibly, maybe likely, this is a lady hawk.
Maybe we can hope for some baby hawks to fledge and the weeks to come? Watching them learn to fly and dive would be amazing.
We get Orioles out here too, but not often. They will swoop in to drink out of the hummer feeders (while making a huge mess) and then take off. It’s all good, I watch them from the kitchen window, then go and hose the mess off which attracts the tiny blue butterflies.
So, anyhow, I’ve been seeing an Oriole recently, so yesterday I cut an orange in half and put it out on feeding station.
No birds were interested. No birds looked at it. No birds even landed on it.
Today, I picked the mummified orange half up and considered using it in some sort of holiday arrangement because it was totally dried out and would probably last forever. As I’m not Martha Stewart, I got over those thoughts quickly and orange went into the trash.
Today in nature, I saw a cactus wren fly into its nest in a Saguaro cactus. While I’ve seen birds feeding on the flowers, I’ve never seen one actually using a nest hole. Another one checked off my bucket list!
Now, that’s exciting. They only time I’ve seen them is when I lived by the MN zoo and at migratory time visiting swans were trying to get in the employee entrance and one was injured. I called into the zoo and they came and declared them strangers that they couldn’t help. They did fly away an hour or so later.
Today I saw papa bluebird feeding baby bluebird. He was cheating a bit, though, since he was taking mealworms from our mealworm feeder and then giving them to baby, who was up in the tree. Hard to get pix of them, so this is the best I could do.
Heading down from Red River NM to Taos on Route 64 this morning, I saw a tons of of prairie dogs (mostly alive) on the road and the shoulder. They were quite occupied with their noses to the pavement, scurrying away at the the last moment as cars approached. I’m guessing they were going after traces of road salt.
The day before, heading up to Red River out of Eagle Nest, a female elk came barrelling down the mountainside to cross the road a couple hundred yards in front of me. She hopped the fences on both sides of the road quite impressively at full gallop.
Apologies to our raccoons. Once I went to work repairing the bird feeders, I realized that the metal pole I can’t straiten was bent by a black bear.
All feeders are being brought in overnight and the dogs are being kept in view.
We have a pair of lovely barn swallows taking over a nest built a couple of years ago on our front porch by a phoebe. They don’t like it when we sit on the front porch (morning coffee) but we tell them “this is our nest, too.”
Here in the hinterlands-west-of-West-Lafayette, we have these odd, brown, prairie dog looking things. I don’t think they’re beavers either. Maybe muskrats? They seem pretty chill, and I see them near ditches or drains or railroad tracks (these have water-filled ditches often), typically when I’m driving past but sometimes when I am hiking.
Nutria (aka copyu) , maybe?
LIVE. I’m sitting in my yard, drinking and smoking. This cutie crept up across the meadow to eat the corn leftover from this morning.
You’re a lucky man.
Indeed.
I think you may be on your way to having more deer. She looks pregnant.
It’s that time, yes.
We have a quail block sitting on an old cookie sheet by the bird feeder. A young Thrasher wandered up and pecked at the tray, which produced a noise. This was interesting, so bird pecked the tray again. Another noise happened. Suddenly bird leaped onto the tray and started pecking and stomping around while waving its wings in the air.
After about a minute of a bird percussion and dance show, it startled and took off.
Wait until a woodpecker finds that tray.
Last few weeks I have been observing jumping spiders on my cement patio. Fascinating creatures, they seems to have extremely good eyesight and show what appears to be intelligence when hunting. They primarily hunt flies on my patio and I will occasionally throw a bug down to see if they will take it. They seem to notice movement at about 3 feet away. Crawling bugs they simply run down and pounce on but winged creatures are where they really shine. They do little dances to gauge how sensitive their prey is to being stalked. They also use the dance to determine the preys field of vision by watching their reaction. Once they determine the field of vision they will make a long circle around the back of the prey and then pounce! I would say they rank very high on the list of successful stalks just based on the dozen or so I have seen they average about 80%.
I saw something this morning I’ve never seen before. I was driving down a somewhat rural road and noticed a mallard duck hen waddling around in a yard. As I got closer, I noticed she was accompanied by her mate who was not the standard green-headed drake. His whole body was iridescent black. I did some googling and am now more confused than ever. There is an American black duck that is related to the mallard duck but is described as having a brown coloration - not really black. It was maybe a Cayuga duck which is a domestic duck and it was just hanging out with the wild ducks. It was beautiful.