Skip to main content

Snowy Day in Ohio

Snowy day in Ohio is an understatement! When we woke up this morning we had about a foot of snow on the ground. We went to TSC on Saturday and stocked up on bird seed and suet to help out our feathered friends during this nasty storm. So far at our feeders we've had goldfinches, house finches, cardinals, blue jays, chickadees, nuthatches, tree sparrows, juncos, house sparrows, downy woodpeckers, mourning doves and a red-bellied woodpecker. We've also had a Coopers hawk visit several times looking for a meal. The wind wasn't too bad Sunday morning so I went out with my camera to see if I could get some photos of birds in the snow.


Northern Cardinal
This first one is of a Northern Cardinal. I've tried for a long time to get a nice photo of a male cardinal sitting on a snowy branch but it never worked out very well for me. I finally got a nice, sharp photo of this cardinal sitting in a snowy thicket.  I like this one because you can see the snow sticking to his black feathers under his beak and I also like the way the branches frame the bird.

Red-bellied Woodpecker
I wasn't expecting the red-belllied woodpecker so it was a nice surprise when it flew in to grab some sunflower seeds. Red-bellied woodpeckers are fairly new residents on our property and a welcome addition to the birds we see on a daily basis.

Black-capped Chickadee
Chickadees are my all-time favorite bird and since we've let our property go wild we've been seeing more and more of them. I love everything about these feisty little birds and they never fail to make me smile! This one was hopping over to the chickadee feeder when I snapped this photo.

It was a lot of fun getting out and hopefully it will give me the fix I need to make it through to spring!


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Day in the Coop

I wrote this in a notebook while "babysitting" in the chicken coop on Friday 10/2/15. I'm sitting on the bottom roosting pole in the chicken coop surrounded by six curious, lively baby chicks and one cranky older hen that Robin calls "Godzilla." She's giving them the "evil eye" while scratching and digging in the bedding and tossing it around, trying to scare them. Today, they seem less frightened by her, although they are still wary and scatter if she approaches too close. They're trying to scratch in the shavings just like big chickens; some of them are even flapping up in an attempt to perch on the roosting poles. They're a little shaky, but they'll catch on. We've been watching the babies, trying to sort out individual personalities so we could give them names. Some of them were easy: Amelia Earhart--the blue Ameracauna who was trying to fly at the age of one day, and Maggie--the other blue Ameracauna, a real sweetie who k...

Two Birds in the Hand

September has been quite a month on our 12 acres. Within less than two weeks I had rescued a budgie(parakeet) and a rogue rooster. I first spotted the budgie one evening as we were shutting up the chickens. He was sitting on a bush in  our backyard. My first reaction was "rare bird" but I soon calmed down after looking at the yellow blob with binoculars. Definitely a budgie. I tried to capture him that evening but he flew off to the top of a very large willow tree. Over the next couple of days we spotted him off and on under the bird feeder but he always flew off with the wild birds every time we walked out the back door. About 3 days later, on our wedding anniversary, I saw him sitting on our chainlink fence all by himself...no other birds around. I grabbed some bird seed and slowly walked over to him, fully expecting him to fly away. He didn't. He let me put my seed-filled hand in front of him and he started to eat the food. While he was eating, I carefully brought up...

The Keetie Factor

Shortly after I wrote my last blog entry, Keetie, my little guinea fowl buddy, and all but one of our chickens were killed. Here is a link to our August Lifestyles 2000 article which is a tribute to this very special bird. Scroll down to page 5 to view the article. http://lifestyles2000.net/pages/aug15/aug15.pdf We still only have the one remaining hen. Her name is Leica and she is currently sitting on an egg that the black silkie laid. I doubt that it hatches but it's worth a try.