The Feathered Folk

, On the first morning of last week's extremely icy weather, the tree out my window was quite the place to be for our local birds!

They just kept coming! Sometimes a few at a time, once a whole flock that a jay chassed away before I snapped a picture. I probably took all of these within a half-hour.

 Bluejay

Fluffy Cardinal :) 

Ordinary Sparrow (I assume?)

Texas' #1: the Mockingbird

This fellow is a mystery. I've just spent about an hour trying to identify it, and no luck.

Mockingbird again :)

It was almost a silhouette already, so I enhanced that.

Going back a couple weeks... we came home one day to find this hawk perched on the fence. Guess how happy I was that he waited for me to take a few pictures before gliding off! I was having a ridiculously hard time identifying him, until I noticed that he is a perfect match to a juvenile Cooper's Hawk! I had only been looking at adults. (yes, birds of prey are always male. Didn't you know that? jk.)

Stare down




 













I love love love watching birds at any time. I admit, though, I was terrified of the loose peacocks at the zoo when I was little. Also the loose turkeys at the farm next to our old neighborhood up north. Also the wild (rather large when a few feet away from your bike, and rather protective of their young) geese and swans that flocked to our ponds/swamps in the neighborhood.

(none of the following pictures are mine; they're 'clickable' to take you to their source)
      Nervous as I was when next to them, I was very happy to have a house with windows that backed up to a swampy wooded corner of the neighborhood, and a long undeveloped stretch of land between several of the houses. We had a large variety of common backyard birds, and egrets and herons visited frequently.

I also remember when we had a group of peacocks roam through, followed from a distance by their breeders who were very carefully herding them home.

Another time we woke up to look out the window and see three or four emu! Yes! Real Emu!

Just strolling through the backyard...

... I think they ambled into the woods to where we couldn't see them anymore.

Another time, there was a group of Sandhill Cranes migrating through the area, who stayed local for three or four days. They would stop in our field area each day, and I learned to recognize their call and run the the window to watch them.

Aren't they all beautiful? I'm always awed by the endless variety and creativity of our Creator.



Don't say I didn't warn you that this blog would be random!