Birds are Back

Spring is always such a fun time to watch birds — we always get a few unusual birds stopping by in addition to the usual suspects starting to pair up for nesting.

Towhee looking for insects.

This high-stepping towhee pranced through the grass beneath our feeders, looking for early insects. With those long legs, you can see that Towhees are well adapted to their habit of jumping and scrapping leaf litter.

Black-capped chickadee with a mouth full of nesting material

After I brush out the dogs, I put the dog hair in an empty suet feeder for birds to use as nest material. You can barely see this black-capped chickadee for all the fur in its beak.

Red-tailed hawk with a distinct belly band.

For the past five to ten years, we’ve had more cotton-tailed rabbits than squirrels. I think that’s why this red-tailed hawk was keeping an eye on the back yard one day last week, perching in the neighbor’s blue spruce tree.

Red-tailed hawk at dawn, perched on the neighbor’s chimney cover.

Then yesterday we had another red-tailed hawk come in to check out the bunny availability. It arrived just after dawn and hung around all day, waiting for an unwary bunny to make a mistake. Look at how much lighter its belly band is compared to the bird shown above.

And finally, I heard our first broad-tailed hummingbird zipping overhead. It’s been cold and wet today so I made up some sugar water and put it in the hummingbird feeders to help the little guys through the night.

4 responses to “Birds are Back”

  1. Hooray for the birds! Great idea re dog hair and suet feeder. 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  2. I love that you make the brushed dog hair so available for the birds! What a treat for their nests. ☺️

    Liked by 1 person

  3. 9uh73gremlin Avatar
    9uh73gremlin

    Hi Amy – not sure if you remember me from school in Broomfield but I’m Nina (van Gorder) Naylor. I stumbled across your blog and appreciate your writing and topics. I also ran across some of our papers we wrote for Mike McNamara’s Creative Writing class in High School. I’ve been focusing on finally doing something with my poetry. Hope all is well! Nina

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Nina! Of course I remember you!
      I think of Mr. McNamara a lot as I write — his was the first class where I could express what I wanted without worrying about writing for a grade. As long as it was well written, it was good!
      Good for you for following up with your poetry. I hope it brings you joy!
      Amy

      Liked by 2 people

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

%d bloggers like this: