12 posts tagged “bird watching”
We were packing up to leave last weekend when I heard a different type of bird chirping from the flower garden next to our door. I went over and in the middle of the flowers was a baby bird precariously perched on a flower that could barely support it's weight.
I ended up coaxing it on to a stick and moving it to a pine tree close by. It couldn't fly yet but i think it was too old to be in it's nest. I looked around for the mother bird or it's nest but they were no were to be found. When I came to check on it a couple minutes later it had climbed the tree about five feet. Seemed like a good sign to me, hopefully the little guy survived!
BUSY!!! I feel so busy lately that I barely know where to start or have time to post about it... Work is super busy, which is always good! Laura and I have been married eight years today and we're going to Walton's Mountain Schuyler, VA this weekend. We've been thinking lately about Charlottesville a lot and it certainly doesn't help that Laura's been Walton's obsessed for a long time now :o) This will be the first time in TWO years that we have both spent the night away from the kids. Which also, by default, mean the first time in two years we've slept through the night together AND the first night in two years that we have not shared our room with one of the kids at SOME point in the night.
Baby birds at Day 11 (two days ago) The Mother Bird didn't spend the night in the nest that night... I'm not really sure why. I was reading that warblers can have a second brood as soon as 15 days after the first one... This is a little soon for her to be away from her babies... but who knows. I've been trying to follow the parents to see if they're building or watching another nest... I haven't seen one yet.
Father bird keeping a VERY close watch... I usually wait until they are away before standing on a chair to get a closer look... he swooped by a couple times while taking pictures to make sure I wasn't harming them. Mother bird seems to be a lot more chill with me.
KIDS
Okay, so i figured out how to finally get an angle... no more crappy laptop pictures... promise :o)
Their beaks are much more pronounced in just one day's time. I snuck up on them last night and watched the mother bird feeding the babies from above. As soon as they heard the flap of the mother's wings they popped open their mouths like Peanuts characters. Today they are moving more than their mouths... i've seen them flopping around in the nest quite a bit.
You can see the beaks and eyes now in the images... their eyes are still shut and they are a lot fuzzier. I have only seem them moving around once... just opening and shutting their mouths. I've noticed that there is absolutely two birds sharing the responsibility of watching after them and feeding them. Is it the father bird? I should research some more on that.
The eggs hatched yesterday. Our persistence seems to have paid off too... The Mother bird is always around but doesn't seem to mind us looking at the babies and being around her nest. I haven't been able to get a good picture yet, the lighting has ust been wrong and the only camera i can snake up there (no pun intended) is the macbook camera which needs to be just right. anyways, i've posted the best picture i have right now. they're fuzzy little balls right now all huddled and sleeping together.
These are the egg pictures from a couple weeks ago, when there was only four and then the final five.
Okay, so i figured out what our bird is. She's a Black-throated Blue Warbler.
If you ever need to figure out what a bird is, check out whatbird.com they have a really easy to use bird finder.
Working until 3am last night affords me the opportunity to post this morning before starting other projects.
/// I have a portrait session at the US Naval Academy tonight with a Midshipmen. I've shot countless weddings there but this will be my first Midshipmen portraits. She knows that though and is getting a discount due to my specific inexperience. The Naval Academy is so steeped in tradition, a portrait session is standard fare and there are specific poses as specific parts of the Academy that need to be captured as well as some standard creativeness.
/// We're definitely building a fire pit in a clearing in our woods next week. We've talked about it for a couple years now but we just need to do it. We have the rocks for the outside of the pit, two kids ready to clear the area and TONS of downed trees in the woods just begging to become firewood. Fire is good.
/// Nature is a great teacher. Did you know that birds lay eggs at different times? Me neither. I posted a picture of our bird's nest a couple days back with four eggs in the nest. I check on it while the mother bird was away yesterday and now there are five eggs! My first thought was another type of bird laid an egg in the her nest for her to raise, but the new egg is exactly like the others. I found that I can see into the nest in between the planks if i'm on top of the deck. (These pictures are using the macbook's camera like a periscope to see inside) I was able to see how really small the eggs are! The eggs are maybe one inch in length. I'd like to get a picture of the mom but she always flies away. I hope that by being in her face all the time she will be less aggressive when the babies come.
/// One of the studios I work for gave me a key and alarm code yesterday. I've maybe worked for him for like 30 hours so far but we've clicked really well. I spent the day there by myself designing albums yesterday. The only downfall of the studio? Endless amounts of chocolate. I have little willpower when it comes to chocolate, especially dark chocolate which was on tap yesterday.
/// Dole's organic bananas have a different sticker on them now. I noticed it when we were at Whole Foods on Monday because Eva put one of the new sitckers on me. It's longer had some more information than normal. Honestly, I didn't read it until I saw about it on treehugger yesterday. They give you the number of your farm. Mine, just like on the website, were form Farm 776. I went to doleorganic.com and read about the farm where my bananas came from. They had a few pictures too. Pretty cool. Thank you Don Pedro of Colombia, your bananas were pretty good!
...Work starts, now.
I had a post in me this morning, but now i forget what it was.
I open up firefox and my gmail and there's letters missing in firefox... ( 0 1 B V and probably more wouldn't display... what? so i close it down and open it back up... same thing. I update all my extensions and disable greasemonkey... now it's fine. I'm guess one of my greasemonkey scripts went crazy. Another project for another time. i LOVE greasemonkey but i don't think i'm really using any scripts for anything productive... We'll see.
But while dealing with all this, FIVE ants have crawled on the laptop... What?! So not only do we have ants and need to take care of it immediately, they are either inside the computer and crawling out or they are on the couch i'm sitting on right now and crawling up.
Not good.
What's equally not good but neat right now is there is a bird that has nested and laid eggs in the support beams of our deck. We live in an apartment under the deck, so we're playing right next to the nest. The mother bird seems fine right now, but when her babies hatch she might get REALLY nasty and overly protective. Last year we moved the nest before she laid eggs.. this year we didn't catch it in time. For now, the kids are enjoying it. The nest is in a spot that there's no way i could look up into the nest. She was out of the nest for a while yesterday so I climbed up there with the macbook using the built in camera as a periscope to see if there were eggs. (All macbook pictures, ignore the quality!)
Okay... now the ant count is up to eight... the last one being on me... they must be coming from the window behind me... it's time to wake up and investigate.
There was an elusive bird last year that I could NEVER find. I would hear it's call in the woods, I would set out to find it and it would always be just out of sight. It was an awesome call. It sounds digital, almost like R2D2 whirring and popping. It fast became my favorite bird even though I had never seen it.
Finally yesterday I saw it! Not just one but four on the same tree! I guess they were migrating back north and were taking a break. I got maybe ten feet from them to check them out really well. I started googling and found a great resource: whatbird.com It is SO easy to use! I put in a few search parameters and found my bird within five minutes.
Go check out the call of the elusive Brown Headed Cowbird
My Groups
-
Kombucha Lovers (host) Updated: Feb 14, 2008
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
