Baltimore Orioles and Rose Breasted Grosbeaks are back! Orioles totally consumed an orange I sliced and put out this morning
Lucky you! Winter is really hanging on here. Robins didn’t show up until late April instead of March. My Canadian birds, Redpolls and Pine Siskins, that hang out here in winter are still here, they should have been gone by March. The only ones that showed up on time are the Grackles, all 450 million of them. Totally screwing up my bird watching schedule.
Second set of oranges today.
ETA: Grackles and redwing blackbirds arrived a few weeks back, as a cacophony!
Bastard.
Gorgeous.
Yes, there was a pretty good breeze. I’ve seen birds kiting or holding over a spot eyeing up prey but there is always some movement going on. This was straight down but not in any sort of dive. the wind must have been very consistent at the time.
I was walking to the mail kiosk in our complex, and as I was walking down some steps by one of our ponds, I saw two male mallards swimming in it. When they saw me, they started quacking and flew over the adjacent fence into the swimming pool. I didn’t mean to startle them!
The only thing is that the two males I had been used to seeing were more the same size. One of these two was noticeably smaller. A new juvenile?
Hummingbirds are back this morning. Got the feeders up and they’re feeding nonstop.
Now it’s my turn to be jealous. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a live hummingbird.
I’ve been busy this week, but I was up in north Norfolk last weekend and the bluebells were at their best
also the bird cherries and for some reason the primroses were still flowering. I think the burst of cold weather followed by warm-and-dry compressed everything.
Also, ducklings!
Something has definitely got out of synch locally, because the ducklings on the New River are very small but some of the coot chicks on the Lea (don’t ask me why one river has ducks and the other appears to be 100% coots) was quite well grown.
Other coots seem to be still sitting. I think a lot of them must have lost their first clutches in the last bit of cold weather.
Bye bluebells, thanks for visiting!
Our remaining eaglet has been banded. The banders think it is a female and it weighs over 9 lbs. already. It’s all mom can do to keep her fed. Still no sign of dad so we think he either succumbed to a fight or to avian flu.
Locally, we seem to be about 3 weeks behind for everything this spring. The peregrine falcons are still egg sitting. In a typical spring, they’d have hatched by now. But summer weather is appearing tomorrow.
I haven’t seen any hummingbirds, but something has been drinking the nectar.
I’ve always wanted to see a European Robin 
. Meanwhile Anna’s Hummingbirds are so common year-round hereabouts that they probably qualify as one of the few species of birds I am just about guaranteed to see any day I go out birding (this time of year we also add a few different migrant species at varying levels of scarcity, Allen’s are also quite common in my area at the right time of year). One man’s exotics…
Nice shots, @merrick!
I grew to adulthood never having seen a live hummingbird. The first one I ever saw was on a trip to California, and I was blown away. Then I returned home to Florida, and started seeing them all the time! They must have been always there, and I wasn’t looking carefully enough. They frequently seem like large buzzing insects.
And now I present your weekly alligator! Today we have the rare action shot:
Hummingbirds are brave little suckers. I’ve been berated by one for allowing my feeder to go low.
I’ve been to Florida and seen alligators. I was at a “spring” (a park kinda thing) and overheard someone talking about seeing an alligator. I walked over to the bridge they’d been standing on and looked out into the distance, seeing nothing. Then I happened to look straight down, maybe 8 feet, and there was one right there! Crazy.
There was actually an article at CNN this morning about how to survive attacks. An interesting part, they say not to bother zig-zagging as you run away (as many people think).
Dayum. I’d be running too fast to zig or zag.
I was going to comment on that – hummingbirds can be down right nasty. They have a pecking order, too. It can be fascinating to just watch a feeder when there’s a crowd of them around and watch all the shuffling of priorities.
And, yes, if they go dive-bombing past your ear, they can seem like a giant bumblebee.
So no “Serpentine! Serpentine!” ?
No doubt! I might suddenly take to the freakin’ air if one of those things came after me.
At Manatee Springs State Park, a couple of water snakes. I was at the park 20 years ago and saw water snakes then. I guess they’re fairly common in the area.
