C-c-cold!

Having grown up in the Chicago area and having spent most of my life in the Midwest, I'm no stranger to cold winters.  However, after being pampered for the past three years in Southeast Texas and Western Oregon, my tolerance for the cold has gone south (no pun intended).  My fingertips were frozen numb after spending no more than 5 minutes refilling feeders in this morning's (gasp!) 33-degree temperatures.  As I type this, my fingertips, toes, and nose are all freezing in my 68-degree home.  Thankfully, the birds are a bit tougher than I am.  And they come out in droves when the temperature drops...


Oregon Juncos eat off of a frost-covered deck on a cold late-November morning.

Much activity has occurred over the past three weeks.  The rain-soaked morning of Saturday, November 17th brought us a juvenile Sharp-shinned Hawk.  Swooping in to hopefully catch a feeding Goldfinches, it landed RIGHT outside the living room window and, after a few seconds, flew up into pine tree and hung out for almost an hour to wait out the heavy rain.  It returned in the early afternoon and tried to flush another Goldfinch out of the Rhododendron bush only a couple feet away from our other living rooom window.  What a sight!  On Thanksgiving morning, the first Townsend's Warbler of the year (looked like a juvenile male) stopped by.  The beautifully-colored and very tame Townsend's is one of my favorite birds.  He was joined by an (Audubon's) Yellow-rumped Warbler.  Later in the day, the Y-R Warbler brought a friend and stopped by the seldom-used suet feeder on the other side of the house.  And earlier today, a more mature male Townsend's (with very dark coloring) stopped by for suet.  Yay!  Late last week, two Spotted Towhees were seen foraging around for fallen sunflower seed.  One of them returned multiple times last weekend and was seen through the middle of this week.  In addition, at least two different Northern Flickers have been stopping by regularly, as have flocks of Bushtits (~10-25 at a time).  A Brown Creeper is stopping by almost every day now for a little bite of suet, as he/she forages its way through the cluster of pine trees.  I'm still spotting Ruby-crowned Kinglets in the mornings, although I have not seen any Golden-crowns for over a week.


Western Scrub-jay stopping in for energy-rich peanuts on a cold morning


Spotted Towhee foraging for spilled sunflower seed


Very grainy, blurry, and poorly-exposed photo of a male Townsend's Warbler

Some usuals and semi-usuals have also been coming by in greater frequency, including Chestnut-backed Chickadees, Downy Woodpeckers, Western Scrub-jays, and American Crows.  The latter two are eating peanuts like crazy, stuffing their bills with 3-5 at a time.  I'm going through 1 1/2 containers of unsalted roasted peanuts per week now!  I'm also seeing more American Goldfinches now.  Not quite as many as back in September and October, but anywhere from 7-30 at a time.  Strangely, Lesser Goldfinches have been extremely sparse, despite the cold.  I have not seen any Steller's Jays for at least a month and it appears that the Varied Thrushes have not shown up for the winter yet (they were not here until mid-December last year).

Last week also saw two Goldfinch window-strikes.  Unfortunately, the first was fatal.  However, a full recovery appeared to happen during the second.  After putting the finch in the box to protect it from predators, it was brought inside for ~30 minutes to warm up.  Shortly after taking it back outside, it flew up into a bush and then across into a tree across the yard about 5 minutes later.


A few of the many American Goldfinches that have visited recently

I've included more photos in this installment than I usually do in tribute to my Canon PowerShot SD450 that has announced its retirement from bird photography.  While I've managed to snap some surprisingly-good shots with this little guy, its meager 3x zoom (105 mm relative to a 35 mm camera) just isn't enough for the high-quality photos that I want.  The additional 4x digital zoom has helped somewhat, but the photos lose a ton of resolution when too much is used (see the Spotted Towhee pic).  Also problematic is the lack of optical image stabilization and the fact that compact camera sensors just flat-out suck in poor lighting (see the Townsend's Warbler pic).  After months of research and a couple trips to the local camera store, I've determined that the PowerShot's successor will be a Nikon D40x digital SLR equipped with a 70-300 mm AF-S VR (optical image stabilization) lens.  This will provide 105-450 mm (relative to 35 mm) of pure optical telephoto power (even trumping the far end of the grainy digital zoom of the PowerShot by 30 mm) and the 10 megapixel sensor will allow for cropping without significant resolution loss.  In other words, it will kick some serious ass and I will begin to feature photos taken from it in the next post.

• Posted at Saturday, December 1, 2007 06:22 PM
• In General Category | Permalink