Winter is hanging on, but it looks like there might be a little maple sap running this week. It’s about darn time as everyone’s woodpile is getting low. I’ve had minus-22, minus-2 and zero degrees for my last three morning thermometer readings, so at least temperatures are going up.
It might even start the cherry blossoms in Washington this week.
My feeder bird population has gone down, but I think a lot of it has to do with the large amount of blue jays that have moved in.
The little birds don’t want to compete with them.
I’ve banded 22 jays in the past two weeks with only one repeat bird. I put up one net yesterday and another one today and caught several new little birds: chickadees, purple finch, juncos, both hairy and downy woodpeckers, plus some jays.
I had a brown tree creeper and some nuthatches around today but didn’t catch any of them.
One of the chickadees I caught today was banded by me in January 2009. I caught it three more times that year and three times in 2010 and hadn’t seen it since.
I caught 12 other chickadees today that I had previously banded, but none were older than this one.
This bird was two years old when I first banded it, which makes it seven years old now.
On Tuesday I took another trip down to the Fairfield area, south of Route 29, to see the snowy owls.
I wasn’t disappointed as I saw five different owls that day and got some great shots.
I was near one female owl that was sitting on a power pole for over an hour. It did nothing but fly to the next pole. That was the second one I saw.
The first one was a male on Hardscrabble Road that was sitting on a pole behind a travel trailer. That bird was 500 feet from the road.
The third bird, a female, was on Davis or Cole Road sitting on top of a silo close to where I saw it the last time.
The fourth bird I saw was a female on 170A sitting on a pole right beside the quiet highway.
I got some nice shots before it flew off to another faraway silo. They seem to like these high perches to hunt from, as they can see and hear prey more than a thousand feet away.
The fifth bird, a dark female, was the most cooperative. It sat on a pole right beside 170, which has some traffic.
It was about 3:30 p.m. and this bird was on the hunt.
Another party that was watching the bird said it took a mouse not 50 feet from the road about a half hour earlier.
There were wind farm towers all around, and this bird took off across the open field and hit the ground almost out of sight.
It took off from there and flew back to a pole two down from where she had flown from, a mouse in her talons.
She was picking at the mouse on the insulator, then flew to top of the pole with it in her mouth.
She picked at it some more before sending it down the hatch in one gulp.
After five minutes she flew out into the field again but missed this time. She walked around stomping through the snow but came up empty.
She flew back to a pole down the road, and before I could get there she went off to a field on the opposite side of the highway.
I drove down and she was out in the field for a long time.
When she came back to another pole she dropped some fur that must have come from the mouse she caught there.
By that time we had attracted several onlookers and photographers. It was getting darker, so I headed home.
Coming down the hill into Middleville I saw a bald eagle swoop down in front of me and land on a dead deer on the side of the road.
My camera card was filled after photographing the owl, but I deleted some shots so I could take some of the eagle.
I shot right through the windshield as the eagle picked up a piece of meat and flew down the highway in front of me.
I don’t know if there is a law about photographing and driving, but I was doing it. I got a couple of flying shots as he went down the highway ahead of me.
On the way down I saw a flock of common mergansers in the river by the Thendara Bridge, a couple single mergansers in the West Canada Creek, and flock of 12 black ducks in a open spot of water opposite the West Canada.
One party I met while photographing the owl had a picture on their camera of a golden eagle that they had taken near Gravesville. It was another great day to be out and about watching nature at its best.
Getting near the end of hare season, but that’s another story… See ya.