Birds!

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I saw a Florida Scrub Jay today. It is endangered, endemic to Florida and is found only in scrub oak habitat.

^^^^SUPERCOOL and lucky!

Today's birds are Great Blue Heron, Spotted Towhee, Canyon Wren, Say's Phoebe, Gambel's Quail

What a beautiful bird.I have plenty of regular blue jays.They started to hog all the suet cakes and got expensive to feed.Now they make do with black oil sunflower seeds and whole corn.

The migration of the bar-tailed godwit is the longest of any bird. The sub-species Limosa lapponica baueri travels the furthest, from Alaska to New Zealand (and back,) without stopping.

Some 9,000 miles, one way.

Wow, I looked it up and it takes about 9 days. 1000 mile per day, i can't drive that far in a day. Equivalent to us running non-stop for a week.

I thought a tern migrating the Americas was the longest but since they can stop aren't considered here.

I saw some fairy-wrens on my walk through the woods yesterday (along a riverbank). I managed to get some photos, which wasn't that easy, albeit I couldn't have done it without the camera and its automatic focus along with the great zoom, as you can't get close to them, and they hop around from branch to branch amazingly quickly and in rapid succession.

Wow!

The Eurasian Jays we get here are not at all rare. But they're so wary of humans, I have only had one definite sighting in my entire life. In London, of all places.

(just to be clear, that is not my photo of the scrub jay; I pulled it off the web. As I did the one below.)

Visiting Selby Botanical Gardens yesterday, we saw a flock of green Nanday Parakeets. They’ve been established here through accidental or deliberate release. They travel in flocks and are VERY NOISY!

They are 12 inches long with 23 inch wingspan. Not your tiny pet store parakeets.

Pileated Woodpecker. Big birds. This morning, sitting outside for quaker meeting, one of our resident birds flew right by me. It is amazing how much bigger they appear when close up.

It breaks my heart that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is essentially extinct. There was also a similar woodpecker living in the hills in northern Mexico. No one has seen one since the 1950s. It was two feet tall.



This is the bird Woody Woodpecker was based on.

Can here woodpeckers making their pecking sounds , Sparrows out and about , and singing and talking .
Robins landing here and there. Looking for mates .. the Yard is soo, full of life in the trees and in the brush .

I've had several sightings, some quite close up, of the Barred Owls that live in the area. There is at least one pair raises their young close by. This time of year, for some reason, they swoop down and fly quite low and are therefore easier to spot.

More red kites lazily circling on thermals, now the weather's warming up.

Yes am seeing lots of Hawks out doing their floating on thermals routine. Abbsolutely lovely to watch them soar ..!

Black buzzards roosting in a tree.

A pair of treecreepers, in a location where I saw them last spring. When I first spotted them, they were walking up the wooden cladding on the side of a building.

Several black buzzards soaring in different neighborhoods here.with white wingtips.. lovely !