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Oct. 14th, 2021 07:40 amWent birdwatching in the back yard yesterday instead of down by the water. (No active mosquitoes at this point, or at least very few.)
Young Cooper's hawks look very majestic when they are diving from their perch somewhat above the telephone wires in an attempt to take their prey. Then they look incredibly frustrated when they find out that the neighbor across the street, who maintains two very popular feeders, also maintains a yard's worth of very thick hedges and all the sparrows know it. The hawk spent a not inconsiderable amount of time perching on the surface of one of the hedges, blinking in confusion and trying at varying intervals to figure out if it could get under the surface without getting scratched or stuck, all while the sparrows yelled at it from just out of reach. Changed position a few times too, in an effort to find an easier spot from which to make a predation attempt.
Don't know what it wound up doing in the end. After a while I left it to its efforts and went back to the backyard.
Had the pleasure of spotting a smallish yellow-green bird with some barring on the wings, and yellow-orange legs. Did some investigating in Merlin, and then checked a photo I had sent to an ornithology volunteer back in 2018. The new visitor was a female blackpoll warbler; we're in the middle of blackpolls' autumn migration. Which is one of nature's more impressive feats, because apparently- I had not known this before looking into the details of what I had just identified- the blackpoll warbler migration is not the kind where one takes off, flies as far as one can in one day, stops to eat and sleep, then flies again the next day. We are instead talking about a bird five and a half inches long, one that weighs approximately twelve grams, that takes off from the northeastern United States and then does not stop flying until it reaches South America. The ones who stop along the way stop in Bermuda or the Antilles, but either way we're talking about a bird that, once again, weighs about as much as my morning coffee- not the beverage, the actual ground-up coffee that I put in the moka pot for brewing- flying nonstop for 72 to 88 hours over the Atlantic ocean at around 27 miles an hour.
I wish the one I saw luck. We just had the Boston Marathon go pretty well up here. I hope her extended run goes even better.
Young Cooper's hawks look very majestic when they are diving from their perch somewhat above the telephone wires in an attempt to take their prey. Then they look incredibly frustrated when they find out that the neighbor across the street, who maintains two very popular feeders, also maintains a yard's worth of very thick hedges and all the sparrows know it. The hawk spent a not inconsiderable amount of time perching on the surface of one of the hedges, blinking in confusion and trying at varying intervals to figure out if it could get under the surface without getting scratched or stuck, all while the sparrows yelled at it from just out of reach. Changed position a few times too, in an effort to find an easier spot from which to make a predation attempt.
Don't know what it wound up doing in the end. After a while I left it to its efforts and went back to the backyard.
Had the pleasure of spotting a smallish yellow-green bird with some barring on the wings, and yellow-orange legs. Did some investigating in Merlin, and then checked a photo I had sent to an ornithology volunteer back in 2018. The new visitor was a female blackpoll warbler; we're in the middle of blackpolls' autumn migration. Which is one of nature's more impressive feats, because apparently- I had not known this before looking into the details of what I had just identified- the blackpoll warbler migration is not the kind where one takes off, flies as far as one can in one day, stops to eat and sleep, then flies again the next day. We are instead talking about a bird five and a half inches long, one that weighs approximately twelve grams, that takes off from the northeastern United States and then does not stop flying until it reaches South America. The ones who stop along the way stop in Bermuda or the Antilles, but either way we're talking about a bird that, once again, weighs about as much as my morning coffee- not the beverage, the actual ground-up coffee that I put in the moka pot for brewing- flying nonstop for 72 to 88 hours over the Atlantic ocean at around 27 miles an hour.
I wish the one I saw luck. We just had the Boston Marathon go pretty well up here. I hope her extended run goes even better.
