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Showing posts with label woodpecker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label woodpecker. Show all posts

Sunday, April 09, 2023

Easter Family Visit

Woodpecker on a tree trunk.
It's Easter Sunday and an atmospheric river has made the morning grey and wet.  In the distant southeast there was a morning glimmer of gold along an edge of pending rain.  Yesterday was sunnier, which is better for my mood.  

We visited my folks for a gathering of ten.  In addition to my immediate family, my vintner cousins, K & B visited.  K & B brought wine, hors d'oeuvres, and an extra boost of energy to the gathering.  My sister put in a lot of effort in to food production, and made a scrumptious chicken main entry.  We (or rather, Mark) brought carrot-cake cupcakes for dessert.  And there were Easter candies. 

The route to my folks' house follows Highway 99 and Territorial Highway.  Over February the bald eagles would gather on the tops of power line poles overlooking the fields where the lambs were being born; one time we must have seen around ten or so.  This time around, we saw five miserable-looking and soaked golden (we think) eagles sulking along the top branches of a tree overlooking the river.  We also saw joggers, who looked like they were inviting hypothermia, but I guess when one is running in 50F rains, it's not so bad.

The rain slacked off some over the day.  In the afternoon a woodpecker visited a dying oak tree next door.  Since it was level with my folk's deck, I managed to get a photograph of it.


Sunday, January 27, 2019

Backyard Birds

Mark (mostly) maintains a suet feeder in our back yard.

It attracts a lot of birds, mostly sparrows, nuthatches, juncos, and scrub jays.  

And crows.  

And squirrels.  

Occasionally we get other visitors--a northern flicker is a seasonal visitor, and the other day I managed to get a so-so photograph of a downy woodpecker.

Photographing birds when they're on the suet block can be a challenge, because the block tends to spin and then the next thing I know the camera's auto-focus has decided to focus on the metal cage the suet is in instead of the bird.  



Monday, January 07, 2019

Sunday Herons

Sunday, Mark and I went for a walk at Alton Baker Park and the Willamette River east of the park.   



I was hoping we'd see bald eagles or other raptors.   The sun hid behind bands of clouds, so sometimes the light was defuse -- other times the setting sun cast ruddy gold beams onto the trees.


About five minutes into the walk, I recalled that herons and other waterfowl like the park. 



Mark saw almost all of the birds before I did and pointed them out. 



The exception was a woodpecker, which I heard before I found.


Mark did spot a hawk, but before I could bring the camera to bear, a crow harassed it, and it flew off over the Willamette. 


We managed to get back to the car before huge black rain clouds hid the sun and sprinkled rain.

More photos here:  https://photos.app.goo.gl/WK6msxQ8cPtJ9nur8