It's a Bird-y Day!

[felis_lupus]

Rough-Legged Hawk
Originally uploaded by gshower7
Photo by S. Leavitt

I do NOT want to be on the receiving end of that look, ever. Glad I'm not a chipmunk.

Today was much improved from yesterday at work. Yesterday is Fired, and I never want to see it again. Gray, cold, rainy. We sent a truckload of shrubs back because they were absolutely awful. Half-dead lilacs, shrubs that were appropriately sized for 3-gallon pots that came in 7-gallon... not good. And not the usual from this particular vendor. Don't know quite what's going on there. Rainy and ick combined with cranky boss and now grumpy Camille makes for an awful day of trying to get the new computer to play nicely with the rest of the equipment in the office.

Today was a day of birds! I was in the perennial yard with one of my (wonderful) new employees, when I saw a rather large, definitely-not-a-robin, bird land in the maple tree outside the office. Very exciting! Called S, our office manager, told her "bring your camera. Yes, with the big lens", and we followed the hawk around the property for a bit. This is the best photo, though I've got to go through the rest, since they're all pretty cool... Discovered after a bit of poking around on WhatBird.com that it is most likely a migrating Rough-Legged Hawk. They come down here for the winter, non-breeding times, and live waaaay up north in Canada the rest of the year. EDIT: 4/25/2011: Actually, it's a Broad Winged Hawk. We got positive ID from the Audobon society later on Thursday afternoon... Still cool, and I'm pretty sure I saw one of these guys last fall too!

The other highlight of today, and what made yesterday not quite so awful, was the return of our flock of Bohemian Waxwings. Not very common east of the Mississippi river, but they apparently dip into New England again for winter migration. There's a colony up in Orono that eats all the crabapples off the trees in the Littlefield Garden at UMaine, and that's exactly what these were doing. At least three dozen, both days. Swooping back and forth between the crabapple and the oak and maple trees, twittering all the way. Beautiful, trilling, tweety birds. I've seen them here before, a few weeks later in the year, eating the fruits off the serviceberries. Maybe they'll stick around for a while. They are absolutely GORGING themselves on the crabapples. So distracted, I was able to get pretty close a couple times. They are such pretty birds. S. took a gazillion photos of them too, I have permission to post a few, and will once I find the perfect one. :)

Time to go dancing now, then two days off! Another fun fencing weekend!

Comments

[nazrynn.livejournal.com]

What happened with your crabapples and the waxwings sounds very similar to an annual occurrence in our front yard: Dogwood berries vs. Robins. Robins always win. But it's really startling to see not just a small handful, but FLOCKS of robins (and no Batman) positively demolishing the bright orange berries on the tree in short order. It usually winds up looking like an Alfred Hitchcock scene in our front yard.

And what a great shot of the rough-legged hawk!

Another great site I use is Cornell University's ornithology lab webpages, if you're also curious about identifying birds by the call, etc.

[felis-lupus.livejournal.com]

I have played around on Cornell's website a bit. Wonderful source!

The flock of Waxwings had a bit of Hitchcock about them too, especially when they all swooped over my head to go back to the crabapple! Eep! I really need to get some fruiting trees planted around the house. I've got a few native pin cherries, but they don't do much besides flower (which is absolutely beautiful! I need to be prepared and get better pictures this year.).