Beginning of Spring Migration

I can tell that it's the beginning of spring migration. Most of the American Goldfinches are gone. After two days, our feeders are still mostly full, which means we're down to our resident birds. Over the last couple of months we've been going through about 14 lbs. of birdseed a week! And most of that ended up on the ground because the finches threw out the seeds they didn't like.

Another way to tell is that we made our usual weekend birding trek and saw very few birds. In a period of 2 hours, I only took 15 pictures. With a digital camera, that's almost none!

However, I got lucky. One hawk that I saw decided to fly around instead of away. I think this may be the "hawk of the day" from yesterday, or at least a relative. Notice the white "eyebrows".

It kept flying back and forth, probably looking at us (or at our vehicle) to see what we would do. But it enabled me to get some pretty good shots. (Not perfect, but not bad, either!)


Here's a shot from the "under side". When I saw this hawk on the telephone pole, I thought it might be the Krider's that we saw last year. It's the same area, so that's a possibility.

Now here's a surprise. The hawk below is a different bird from the one above. We ended up quite a ways north of our normal route, on FM 529 -- not a good road for stopping and taking pictures! There were two hawks on a telephone pole cross-bar and not much traffic, so we turned around to look. One flew right away, but the second thought about it for a moment. Then flew! I snapped a really quick shot, being certain that it wouldn't come out at all. Well, it's the usual "hawk flying away" shot -- but it turned out pretty well. So all in all, not too bad for a slow birding day!


I should mention that one of the birds we were particularly looking for today was an Eastern Bluebird. We haven't seen any since those shots I took in January. Well, surprisingly, we did see one. Just one. And it was on one of those roads without shoulders and with traffic. So I didn't get a photo. But I'll keep trying. Just be aware that I'm easily distracted by hawks -- I'm sure you're surprised at that! ;-)

Yard Birds

Today was one of the first clear days in a week. I had been waiting all week to get back out and take more pictures . The day wasn't as clear as I had hoped, in fact it was pretty overcast -- but at least it wasn't raining.


I started close to home -- right outside the front door in fact. I don't use a tripod. I suppose I should. These pictures were taken with my new Pentax K100D with a 300mm zoom -- still hand-held, but I braced myself on my truck.


Isn't this guy handsome? I think he was posing for me!



Here's my favorite shot of the three! We got a special deal with my camera of a photo-printer, so we printed this one. It really came out nicely.






Another great shot from the yard. This is only one of dozens (maybe more) American Goldfinches that visit our feeders in the winter. It's really fun to have these visitors, but they are sooooo messy! They not only feast on the thistle seeds we have for them, but also get on the feeders. The bad thing about this is, they throw out all the seeds they don't like -- so we're going through almost a full bag of seeds in a week or less.