BIRDs

Click the pics.... Who knows what will happen if you don't !!!

Since this blog post is about birds, I dug way down deep in my dusty old picture pile and found a few bird pictures that I took 20+ years ago. They don't look that great because I had a cheap camera and these were very small JPEG's. These pictures were taken in the yard at my home in the mountains.

It looks like we're going to be continuing with our, kind of hot in the daytime and pretty chilly at night, weather for the next week or so, then it's supposed to cool down a little bit. Cooling down some is fine with me as long as it's not too cold when I head down South to Colorado's San Luis Valley to chase some birds around.

I've never intended to become a "Birder," which is the new name for what used to be "Birdwatchers," and yet for some reason, I find myself anticipating driving hundreds of miles to see a bird. I guess one of the reasons I never considered myself a Birdwatcher is because Birdwatchers seem to be interested in, and apparently put great stock in knowing the name of, and how to identify every single bird alive. Whereas to me, there are two categories of birds, some you eat, and some you don't.

Knowing only two categories of birds worked well for me for a long time, but when I got interested in taking pictures of things, I needed more knowledge of birds than I was getting with my previous two categories. So despite my concern about making things too complicated, I invented two more bird categories, birds that are worth taking pictures of and birds that aren't.

Now in those two new categories, the birds that aren't worth taking pictures of are by far the largest category, and one of the ways I identify those birds is quite simple; if it comes to your birdbath, it's probably not worth a picture.

There are, of course, exceptions to that rule; for instance, when I lived in the Colorado mountains in a house that didn't move, I had a birdbath on the back deck, and there was a one footed Crow that visited that birdbath for years that I took a picture of. And on a couple of occasions, a huge hawk stopped by and took a bath, and hummingbirds were visiting all the time in the Summer. But for the most part, in less, you live in South Florida and have Flamingos in your birdbath, regular birds that hang around the house and all look the same as far as I can tell, just aren't worth using up the limited amount of picture taking skills I possess.

                        theboondork

This one footed crow showed up on my deck one day with a bleeding stump where her foot had been. I felt sorry for her and put out a piece of bread which she ate and started coming back regularly, hopping around on one leg. Every summer for about seven years she would come back with two or three babies that were old enough to fly. Life must've been tough for her because she only had one foot to hang onto a branch while she was sleeping. One day I realized I hadn't seen her all summer... And she was gone.

Of all the birds, I like the hummingbirds the most. We had so many at the house that we would go through a gallon of sugar water a day keeping them fed. They build their nests and raised their young in the National Forest around us.

I believe these are Finches but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. I think they just traveled through the mountains on their way to somewhere else since I wouldn't see them for very long.

A Woodpecker and family in my front yard. Woodpeckers used to drive me crazy pecking on my wood- stoves metal chimneys.