Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 09/30/2025 5:36:50 AM PDT by Red Badger
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
Yes! And nobody messes with hummingbirds, either...when they get aggressive, other birds clear out!
My dad told me when he was the XO of a destroyer back in the early Sixties going through the Suez Canal, they had a hawk perched on the top of the mast, plucking some other bird, and all the crew was looking up at it as the downy feathers came floating down!
Your observations are amazing. Patience must be dominant in your personality. Truly impressive.
I spent a year after retirement standing at windows videoing birds and squirrels. Nothing like your observations. Just pure pleasure. My patience comes from my notebook logging where I kept track of every bird leaving and arriving for the videomaking.
Backyard Birds - Mozart Piano Sonato in D - 1993
https://youtu.be/zPeUh_Z1dEQ
Night Visitors - Joseph Blanchard - Whimsical Foray
https://youtu.be/4Fz_w97bt4s
Baby Birds - Etude - Chopin - 1993
https://youtu.be/5pVqvCsrZaY
Winter Birds - Chopin’s Etude - 1993
https://youtu.be/XBkqOxMNP4E
Birds and Squirrels - 1993
https://youtu.be/QMSZo73V7D8
Dragonflies and Wildlife Refuge - Mozart - 1993
https://youtu.be/vtjtecjzXhY
Blue Jays sound as if they are sinful.
From grandfather’s articles.
The Water Ousel, Nature’s Premier Singer of Melodies
Nevada State Journal, October 28, 1923
******
Get Acquainted with Nevada’s Birds Says Jack Bell
Nevada State Journal, October 24, 1926
******
The Glorious Glow of the Sangre de Cristo II
Nevada State Journal, December 24, 1922
I agree...and I have come to love observing crows as well...though I am glad I do not live close to a roost of them. A “murder” of crows...love that description of their group!
Crows seem much more like “older people” as Blue Jays are to “teenagers” in my mind.
I could go on all day on the events I have seen with birds. Recently a bald eagle in a field eating a rabbit. Another time a flock of turkeys chasing a dog. My wife was working in her flower bed one day and she had a blouse with a pattern of red roses. A humming bird flew right up to her, maybe only 6 inches away, and flew all around her until it decided the roses weren’t real. One day last year I was looking at all of the dandelions in my lawn. They started to move! Then one of the flew! A flock of goldfinches had come to eat the seeds, but at first sight it just looked like a lot of dandelions. Many more stories including the rescue of a kestrel with a broken wing we took to a rehab facility. When the wing was healed, they called us and said your bird is getting fat, and ready to be released. You can come and watch if you like. I said that would be great but could I return it to where I found it? They hemmed and hawed a bit but said yes, it would be the best for the little hawk. What a gorgeous bird it was. When we released it in the field across from where we live, it circled around us, dipped it’s wing as if to say thanks, and flew up to the tallest tree in the woods to survey it’s old hunting grounds. What a beautiful sight and it really made me feel human.
I am a bird watcher, sort of, that is, when I have a chance to sit down and watch them. Or maybe I am an animal watcher, because I will try to observe anything in my backyard.
That Tufted Titmouse eating from your hand is cute. I’ve never tried to get that close.
“Yes, they are. Don’t know about Green Jays, though..............”
the greens are jealous of the blues and that makes them even bigger dicks.
Thanks for posting
Thanks for posting
“”Our Bluejays are mean, vindictive and intelligent.””
That’s not meanness. It’s bravery and nads. I’ve seen a bluejay dive-bomb my dad for being too near one of their nests. It was hilarious, but also gave me respect for that bird. He was doing what most humans would do if their kids were being threatened.
Some of the best games I remember from the 1980s were the Jays Tigers matchups and the budding rivalry that was developing at that time. Only a 4 hour drive between them so one could do a day game day trip. Once they got placed into different divisions the rivalry all ebbed away. They still played each other but due to the unbalanced scheduling it was rare in comparison to the within division games.
You bet! Love seeing a bird thread...:)
Yeah! I’m with you-I like watching it all.
And I have to tell you-having a wild animal land on your hand and eat from it-that is as charmed as I could get!
And they are sharp, cute little birds. I really like those Tufted Titmouse types! And I like Chickadees, too.
Chickadees are interesting. They did an experiment, and found that Chickadees (who hide, or cache their food so they can get through winter, can remember the location of 6,000 pieces of food they have hidden!!!
Interesting! I had no idea that Chickadees did that! (They sound like squirrels in that regard.)
The past month or so, I have been involved in a new “wildlife” project. I’ve been working with Monarch butterflies. I’ve had one variety of Milkweed plants (swamp) in one landscape bed for a few years, with once in a while seeing a few caterpillars every year.
Then a year ago, a friend of mine had a different variety, common milkweed, and was wanting to thin out her patch. So we dug some up, and I transplanted several of them near my swamp variety. This year, those transplants went crazy, and when the Monarch butterflies came in August, they went to town on eggs. Every day I had dozens and dozens of new caterpillars show themselves, for weeks on end.
Well, we had a cold spell several weeks ago. So I ordered a butterfly habitat, and coaxed 35 caterpillars that were hanging all over my milkweed plants into the habitat, and I brought inside for several days and nights. It warmed back up, and only 2 of those 35 didn’t complete into a chrysalis.
So for roughly 2 + weeks. I have been periodically watching butterflies emerge, and letting them fly free into the big wide world. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks. I’ve learned a lot, having never done anything like this before.
So far, 30 butterflies have emerged and flown off. 15 were males, and 15 were females. There’s one chrysalis left that looks like it will be fine. 2 others look diseased, so that’s a shame, but that’s nature.
We are fortunate to live on an almost 2 acre lot. The front is neighborhood. The back is private, very wooded, with a creek in the back. Beyond that is farmland with corn and soybeans. I have our property certified as a wildlife habitat, because that’s really what we have here. We are considered “semi-rural”. Hubby says it’s the best of both worlds. We have neighbors if we need them, and a good bit of privacy, too. We share our lot with the wild animals, and they let us watch them.
So, you have some wet areas on your property...my wife would like that, as there are certain plants she likes but we can't grow them. It sounds like you have a terrarium of some kind that you can watch the caterpillars go through their change into butterflies? That is interesting-never done that.
When I lived in Japan as a kid, they had some kind of enormous pale caterpillars that would inundate the environment...I thought they were cicada caterpillars, because they have a lot of cicadas there (which were deafening and all over the place) but...I found out they don't have caterpillars. They kind of looked like silkworms, they were very big and fat. On the base, we had large concrete cisterns all over the place (Probably from WWII to use for fighting fires from American air raids) that held rainwater or they were filled manually with water, I don't know. They were square, stuck up a few feet out of the ground, and went down perhaps ten feet, and filled with what appeared to be polluted water. It always looked black. They were open on top and covered with chain link fence, probably to keep kids like me from falling in. However, we would go on top of them and jump up and down, using the chain linked fence as a trampoline! Didn't even cross our minds it might give way!
But, there were times of the year they were absolutely carpeted with those huge, disgusting, waterlogged corpses of those pale caterpillars! You would think the concept of having the chain link give way, plunging you into that disgusting water that was covered completely with those caterpillars would be enough to keep you off of them, but...no. Typical kid short-sightedness!
I have a standard quarter acre lot in a "ranch land" neighborhood, but we have our property completely fenced in, and my wife has turned it into a secluded paradise for me!
The shed was there when we bought the house, solidly built with a concrete foundation and a single unauthorized power wire sent to it underground by the previous owner that was never brought up to code, but I don't think I will ever address that. I built the three pergolas nearly forty years ago now (only two are visible) and they are still holding up, especially the one with my beloved hammock in it. (I also put a hammock in the shed, but I was out there drinking moonshine one night, and realized how dangerous that small hammock is to get in and out of! I had it custom made so it would fit in there, but...when you reduce its size, it becomes more unstable. It is about four feet off the hard concrete floor, and I realized, after having about half a mason jar of that moonshine, that I was taking my life in my hands...if I fell asleep and fell out of it to that concrete floor, I think that will be the end of me!
A couple of years back, the fence was somewhat in disrepair, and as everyone knows, replacing a fence is big money. My wife suggested we take it down and not put another one up, but I said absolutely not. I would use my own money saved to build a new one. I cannot imagine having an open backyard in a neighborhood. My wife understood, and we put up another fence. I just spent about four hours yesterday trying to fix the double doors to the back yard, as they were out of alignment, would not close, and the bunnies in the neighborhood could pass freely underneath.
We had new neighbors move in behind us a few years ago, and they put in couches and strings of extraordinarily bright lights right on the other side of the fence near my hammock. (you can see it in the background) When they turned on those lights (there are about twenty of them, which are the non-frosted, clear, white lights with the exposed filaments that are brilliant, each one about 100 watts) it lit up the entire neighborhood for three houses in every direction as well as all the trees and everything as if there were giant spotlights. I usually have my window shades up and the windows open in the summer, and it lit up the entire bedroom as if car headlights were shining in. They would leave them on all night long, and it began to make me angry, and my mind began to think of things to do about those lights, none of them good or neighborly, and which could have landed me in jail.
Finally, I picked a bag of grapes from the vines the grow above my hammock, and brought them over (as a peace offering!) to ask if they could turn out the lights when they weren't using them. They have been great about it, and now, if they are having guests or something, they do rarely turn them on. I was so grateful they were so gracious (I don't think they had any idea what the lights were like to others) because I simply could not enjoy the night out there. My joy in life (besides my wife...:) is that backyard, that shed, that birdfeeder, that landscaping, and that hammock. I smoke a pipe occasionally, and one of the best things is to go out there for a few hours as the sun goes down, and the sky changes from blue, to lilac, to violet, to indigo, and then to black. When the light is violet and the sun has not been down that long, all the tree branches and everything else is silhouetted in black. It is beautiful. During June and July, I see fireflies come out, which still even at my age, manage to evoke the emotions of childhood. I can puff on that pipe and think.
This is what it looked like last night as I lay in my hammock which faces Southwest:
I can see the stars appear, and if it is windy, I can hear the waves of wind advancing towards me in the dark through the boughs of the neighborhood trees. It reminds of the ocean, which I miss.
With my job that I just retired from after nearly forty years at one place that was a very stressful, deadline filled, patient care job, that backyard has saved me by reducing my stress. My one regret is I cannot bring my cats outside anymore, since we keep them strictly inside. But my cats in the past (when dogs and cats often had the run of the neighborhood) used to jump up and lay on top of me as I relaxed in my hammock. I miss that.
If or when the time comes I can no longer live here in this small piece of paradise, I will miss that so much my heart will ache.
Beautiful yard you have there!! I can see why you enjoy it so much!
Before this house, we had always neighbors on every side, but I grew up with very few neighbors, so I was unaccustomed to being that close to people with our children. It was all we could afford, but with each move, we got a slightly bigger home and slightly more property. I agree though, good fences make good neighbors. We are lucky to get along with the ones we have. That may eventually change, but I will always try to get along with people if I can.
I love your hammock view! What’s not to like, right?! Your own slice of Heaven right there!! ❤️
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.