Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

The feeding station isn't just for birds. Gray and sometimes eastern fox squirrels, opossums, chipmunks, raccoons, cottontail rabbits and white-tailed deer all partake of the offerings here.

I put out enough corn to constitute a treat for the deer who know about it. Maybe four cups a day. I enjoy watching them come in so timidly.

Here's Boss Doe, snow on her coat. She's looking a wee bit pregnant, a bit rounded.

Please don't miss her eyelashes and face whiskers, the longest of anyone's. She's also got some impressive white chin whiskers.

The bucks are looking a little disconsolate, now that they're dropping their antlers.

Besides the slightly Roman nose characteristic of bucks, he's got a nice pedicel scar just above his eye.

Pedicel scar, a little closer. Pretty how the snow is frozen in mid-descent by my wonderful Canon 7D.

I'm greatly encouraged to find a high count of 30 cardinals at the feeder so far this year. Last year I had to work to find seven! I will probably never know what happened to the cardinals in 2013-14, but many people reported steep declines.

30 will do. Favorite cardinal shot in some time. Look at the snowflakes clinging to his whiskers. It's a whisker post.

Yes. I'm looking at you. I'm the Seed Lady. You know me.

All these photos are taken from my drafting stool, just looking out the studio window. When we bought the house in 1992, there was no studio. And there were no trees or shrubs. No birches, no spruces, no arbor vitaes. Nothing had been planted near the house but for one dahlia, and a trumpetvine that had sprung up and climbed up under the shingles. That, we eventually got rid of.

Everything else we put here, and all the wildlife has come in because of it. This is just the span of an hour or so on February 16, 2015.

As I watch and shoot photos, two deer come in. One looks familiar, very familiar. Barely bigger than her yearling son behind her. I know that doe.

It's ELLEN!!

this taken 1/29/15, her first appearance this winter. Hi baby doe!

Beautiful Creatures

There is a beautiful hermit thrush hanging around the scrubby border of our yard, eating sumac fruits and occasionally coming out to toss leaves on the asparagus/rhubarb garden. Every day I hear its bell-like call through the double-pane glass, and I look for that thrushy outline as it hops springily on the ground. When it gets really nasty I'm going to scatter Zick dough on the ground where it forages. Everything gets fed eventually.

Hermit thrush in the ruined asparagus. He's just left of the wooden stake. Hermits are a part of our wintering avifauna, though there are many winters when I see none. I'm grateful for this one. He makes my day.

On December 2 I was deeply blessed with a small flock of robins that stayed in the yard most of the day. Every time I watched one it caught an earthworm in short order.

There's plenty of sumac fruit to eat, too, but if you can get earthworms, stick with the protein.

I may have sung the praises of robins in this blog before, but oh. This is one of my very favorite birds to paint. Look at the architecture of those wings, the clean geometric lines of this hearty chunky bird. They almost draw themselves. It's all so clear on robins. 

This time of year they have fresh feathers, each of which sports a frosty white edge. They're never more beautiful than in early December. The paler the better, as far as I'm concerned. Frost robins.

I have recently become very concerned about our cardinal population. We've lived here for 21 years and I've never seen a winter when they were so scarce. We have two.

You take them for granted when there are sixty. Well, I don't, but you do get used to seeing a lot of cardinals. And when they're gone...

Our next-door neighbors report that they have none, Shila in Marietta has none, and an unofficial survey of other Ohioans around our state nets next to no cardinals. Athens, Little Hocking, Marietta, Whipple: practically none. Whatever could be going on? Do you have cardinals where you live? 

I'm trying to find out what's happening to them. This abundant bird simply can't be disappearing, can it? And if it is, why?  Please leave a comment if you have any information or observations. Be sure to tell me where you live.

Button buck, have you seen any cardinals?

 I'll tell you where they are. Not here. Not in the woods, either, because I checked.

I was so hoping one of these antlerless deer would be my fair Ellen, but I have yet to see her this year. Every year is different. She usually comes in December. I've got a little corn out, waiting. I'm waiting anyway.

Waiting for Piper

Bird photography requires great patience and a quiet, still center. You must be willing to wait for the moment when the bird you're after finally shows up and does the thing you're trying so hard to photograph. You set yourself up and make sure you're in the right place at the right time and then you hope.

I do a ton of bird photography; I spend part of every day doing it. That's because my studio window is set up to look out on one bodacious planted bird paradise of a yard. I'm bragging because I done made it myself. Everything that's there we planted, and the birds thank us by coming in close.

But waiting for Piper isn't like tapping away at your keyboard and staring to your left, then grabbing your camera as I'm doing right now. (I've taken dozens of photos of hummingbirds and yellow-throated, prairie, pine and Blackburnian warblers while trying to get this post written). It was a much more purposeful thing, because I had to wake up at 4:45, clear the blear from my eyes and be ready to rock.

Sometimes Piper would show up when there was enough light to catch him, and sometimes he wouldn't.

But other birds showed up.

Male cardinal, born this summer. He's getting his all-red bill and breast. 

Another one, peering up at me from the bell post. I love these scruffily endearing babies.

I did not expect a female Baltimore oriole to drop in while I was fruitlessly waiting for Piper to come back. But I was very grateful that she chose to check out the landscape roses growing by the water garden. The light was very low, but luscious.

There were more--tufted titmice and Carolina chickadees; a scruffy-looking common yellowthroat. But my favorite of the bonus birds I saw while waiting for Piper was this one: a Baltimore oriole fledgling. Oh, thank you for choosing poke as your perch. Your colors are divine. Positively tropical!

Just look at your little blue feet, you cute thing. Ahh, I love freshly minted birds.

I realized that I could just hang out the bedroom window all morning, Piper or no Piper. But oh, when he did appear...

Warbler Photography, Quick and Dirty

A migrant white-crowned sparrow hops amongst the dandelions and spent lilac flowers.

It's here, that time of spring when everything happens too fast. There were still migrant blackpoll warblers singing this morning, sounding, as Jeff Gordon points out, like a bike wheel out of true: tsit tsit tsit tsit tsit.

I look at my spring bird photos and know I must post them before they go bad.

We won't go bad. We stay around all year.


One of the cuter tufted titmouse displays--presenting the fluffy butt. Good thing they're both presenting at the same time. Nobody gets insulted.


A cardinal sits with a white-crowned sparrow. That little crown stands out like a logo--you can identify this bird at a ridiculous distance.


This pair of cardinals is always exchanging sweet seed kisses.


Meanwhile, the blue-winged warblers are making our old decrepit orchard a wonderful place to be. Part of the courting razzmatazz of the blue-winged warbler is spectacular chases, looping in and out of low prickly vegetation.

Most of the looks you get are like this:


and then they're off again. But sometimes you get a clear look at the warbler's disappearing tail.


or its back as it pauses to catch its breath.


And then sometimes, if you stand around in the briar patch for an hour or so, waiting and taking dozens of pictures, one pauses long enough for you to fumble the manual focus onto it before it wings away again. Autofocus is not an option, with so much bramble in the way. The camera will pick an extraneous twig and focus on that instead of the bird. Maybe I'm weird, but I absolutely love trying to get my lens on a warbler and manually focus him into a decent image. Maybe because it's almost impossible. I love a challenge.

This isn't publishable, but it's good enough for me, and a heck of a nice way to spend a morning before the bus comes.

Cardinal in the House

I'll be honest: I'm spent from the giant otter orgy. Learning enough about them to write intelligently about them, editing the photos and composing the posts--mostly figuring out how to break this continuum of otter love into manageable pieces, was a big job. I'm not done with Guyana by a long shot, and I hope you're enjoying the tropical escape as much as I am. But I'm writing about cardinals for my next book, and they are much on my mind. I love them, love the fact that there is this brilliant red grosbeak that is ridiculously common (at least in southern Ohio) and can amass flocks of as many as 70 birds in my backyard. Please. 70 cardinals in a snowy backyard is something to see, my friends.

Just before the leaves fell I heard chipping from the living room. I had been in the habit of leaving the patio screen door open for Chet to come and go on those mild Indian summer days of late fall. He likes to lie in the sun out on the deck, baking his liver and lights, then come back in and cool off in the living room. Here is a gratuitous puppeh picture of Chet, worshipping the golden orb. I do not apologize for inserting a dose of Baker into most posts. He's essential Vitamin B, soaking up his Vitamin D.
photo by Bill Thompson III

A young male cardinal, his bill still black with youth, blundered into the living room and went straight for the high clerestory windows where he tried to make an escape through the glass. That's our bird tower you can see through the window.
There was nothing for me to do about it but go fetch the huge extension ladder from the garage. I don't much like carrying it and setting it up by myself inside the house, because I am 5'5" and it is 12'8". CLANK!I especially dislike setting it up right next to my 40-gallon freshwater Amazon tank, which is full of my little home-bred Emperor tetra friends (35 at last count) who are freaking out and praying that I won't screw up and smash their world. While I'm setting the ladder up I'm thinking, OK. If it tips and hits the tank, the first thing I will do is go get a muck bucket from the garage, and I'll fill it with one of the rainwater jugs from the orchid room, and then I'll scoop up all the wriggling fish from the living room carpet and put them in there, and then I'll put their heater in there, and then I'll go get that bowfront tank I have always wanted. But what if I have to drive to Columbus to get it? Better put the filter in, too. My Emperor tetras, who don't know when to quit mating and are all brothers and sisters and kissin'  cousins. They're their own grandpas.

Thoughts like that run through my mind. Contingency planning for the worst. They are likely not all that dissimilar from the panicked thoughts that run through a trapped cardinal's mind as I clank around beneath him.

I have to set the ladder up under the window that the cardinal has chosen, and climb it as quietly and unscarily as possible so the cardinal (or whatever bird is trapped; I've had everything from hummingbirds to brown creepers up there) won't freak out and switch windows, making me climb down and move the blinkin' ladder again.Cardinal, check. Ladder, check. Tank, check. OK. We're ready to climb. Gloves on?

I usually don't use gloves when handling birds, as there's no problem with leaving your smell on them (they don't mind and can't smell anyway.) With gloves you run a greater risk of hurting a bird through clumsiness. And most birds can't hurt you, more than maybe a pinch. So gloves are definitely overkill for handling 99% of the songbirds that you encounter. But cardinals are another matter. This little guy was too young to know how, but usually a cardinal who is caught in the hand will take the crushing power of that conical bill and turn it toward the webs between your fingers to excruciating effect. They'll grab those tender bits of skin and twist and wrench while biting down and OWWWWW it's all you can do to hold on. This guy was much more polite than most cardinals. Titmice and chickadees can open a good hole in you, too. They hammer your knuckle like it was a nut.
Before I released the little shaver, I took a good look at him, and noticed an anomalous patch of white feathers on his chin. I'm going to look at our winter flock and see if he retained it after the postjuvenal molt, see if there's a bright red boy with a white chin out there somewhere.
You're free to go, pretty one. See you at the feeders!