Snow Day!

[felis_lupus]

Sparrow
Originally uploaded by gshower7

Blizzard-like conditions maybe not, but the plows are not doing a terribly efficient job of clearing the roads of the most recent snowfall. After both of my co-workers called me and said "I'm not coming in", and I ended up with the car never actually pointed in the direction of travel as I tried to make it down the hill and into work, I gave up, slid back home, called the boss, and said 'not gunna do it.' I don't think the shop was anywhere near cleared out anyway...

In an effort to thwart the red squirrel that regularly empties both my neighbors' feeders, I purchased and put up a window feeder earlier this week. The Chipping American Tree Sparrows, at least, have found it. I scared a Chickadee off of it a few days ago, and hadn't seen any activity since. This morning I was greeted with squabbling sparrows outside the kitchen window. They apparently don't like to share. Something like this would be ideal... possibly only house one bird at a time, again, since they don't like to share, but it would be less of a gymnastics routine to get good photos of the li'l guys. :)

And some fun linguistic facts about sparrows: A group of sparrows has many collective nouns, including "a crew of sparrows", "a flutter of sparrows", "a meinie of sparrows", "a quarrel of sparrows", and an "ubiquity of sparrows." A group of Chipping Sparrows are collectively known as "a tournament of sparrows." (many thanks to www.whatbird.com.)

edit 03/07/2008 - not a Chipping Sparrow after all. see here for details...