Old Man Winter ~ First Week of 2013

Well, the first week of 2013 has been cold, snowy, and icy. Just when we were getting used to it, the roads had been plowed and we could get around once again, Old Man Winter brought us several more inches of new snow overnight.  It doesn't make for the best birding.  Who wants to get out in the frigid cold when it's down to 1 degree Fahrenheit or snowing all day long?  Not this little chickadee!  

It's times like this that I am thankful for my yard birds that are attracted by my suet feeders.  For this first week in my 2013 Big Year it has been the trusty Red-breasted Nuthatches, between 1 and 4 of them visiting the suet each day.  Along with them is a female Downy Woodpecker.  Those were the only birds I had seen until Sunday, when two new birdies came to the suet feeders. I was excited to see a couple of Black-capped Chickadees and a White-breasted Nuthatch in the yard.

White-breasted Nuthatch

These four species of social birds often winter together in small mixed feeding flocks, so it is not unusual for them to be seen together.  The flocks are better able to keep an eye out for predators and can send warning signals to the other members.  They are also better able to find food and are less wary about visiting feeders.  A group of nuthatches are called a "jar" of nuthatches.  A group of chickadees is a "banditry" or "dissimulation".  Woodpeckers are known as a "descent" or a "drumming".  So what are these mixed flocks known as?  A "jar of drumming banditry"?  I get a kick out of some of these collective nouns they come up with for groups of birds.

An interesting fact about the White-breasted Nuthatch is that they are usually quiet during breeding season and in the summer.  But certainly not in the winter and spring.  They have a nasal sounding 'yank-yank' that is quite distinguishable of the nuthatches when you hear it.  The Black-capped Chickadee have their own cute little song... 'Chick-a-dee-dee-dee', hence the name.

Black-capped Chickadee

To sum up my 'Big Week' of 15 birds, (giggle)...                                                                                                            

Sherrie's Lakefront Yard Birds

Red-breasted Nuthatch

Downy Woodpecker

White-breasted Nuthatch

Black-capped Chickadee

Sherrie's Big Year Birds

American Crow

Red-tailed Hawk

Black-billed Magpie

Rock Pigeon

Herring Gull

American Kestrel

Canada Goose

Common Merganser

Mallard

American Coot

Wild Turkey

New Features on Bird Lady Blog

The days have been cold and long and boring.  Not many birds now that the lake is frozen.  So I decided to add some new features to the Bird Lady Blog.  Now, there is a Photo Gallery page in addition to a Home page where all of my blog posts appear.  The Photo Gallery page has most of my photography that I have shared here on the blog.  Each picture is linked to the original blog post that was associated with the photo.  Here you can scroll through the pictures, and if something catches your attention, you can go right to the post, which will open in a new window.

Also, new on the Bird Lady Blog, is the BirdTrax gadget.  Yes, more tech gadgets for birders! You will find it on the right hand column above my life list of birds.  BirdTrax displays eBird sightings and data, and can be customized to your liking.  I have mine set to show sightings in a 30 mile radius around my Loon Lake home in the last 30 days.  I was going to change up the settings, but have found I can't get access to the code like I did when I put it on here.  So I guess for now, we are stuck with it like it is.  Oh well, it shows my sightings and others in the community that have submitted to eBird, so it's all good.

A view counter is now located to the right above the archive directory, so you can see how many visitors the Bird Lady Blog has been getting.  I am thankful to my Facebook and Google+ followers for my increased traffic lately.  In just the last month, Bird Lady Blog has had over 500 page views for a total of 1454 as of this moment.

Recently I also added a couple of ways to quickly become a Bird Lady Blog follower on the right hand column.  You can submit your email address and become a follower, or you can subscribe to posts and/or comments. I'm always interested in other bird bloggers and photographers and would love for you to become a follower. Be sure to leave me a comment on the blog to let me know you stopped by!

A couple of cosmetic changes were made, like enlarging the headings so they are easier to see, and I made them look just a tad fancier :o)  Also planning on changing up the header and footer photos, but I'm having a hard time deciding which ones to use.  So it will be a bit yet before you see those.

Hopefully, you will enjoy these newly added features here on the Bird Lady Blog!

As I'm finishing up the final touches on the pictures for this blog post, my husband was flicking through the T.V. channels and happened to stumble on one of my favorite movies "The Notebook".  My favorite part just played where they are at the beach with all the seagulls and she is talking about wondering if in another life she was a bird.  She starts "ka ka ka'ing" and flapping her wings, and makes him say she is a bird.  Then she says "Now say you're a bird".  He replies, "If you're a bird, I'm a bird".  Love that part!

The only visitors to my yard in 2013 have been four Red-breasted Nuthatches and a female Downy Woodpecker.  They have been there each day so far.

Happy Bird Year!

New Year's Eve most people are getting ready to go out to parties to toast in the new year.  What was I doing?  Filling up my two empty suet feeders making sure they were ready to go.  Hanging a barely ever used bird feeder outside my balcony and filling it with some black oil sunflower seeds that I happened to find in the cupboard when I was looking for the suet.  Hardly saw any birds on New Year's Eve day, probably because my suet had been empty, and the bay was freezing over.  Only saw three Common Goldeneye. But now that my suet cages are full and my feeder has seeds, I am raring to catch a glimpse of the first bird on my 2013 list!

Woke up to a totally frozen bay, and most of the lake. Disappointing because that really hampers my waterfowl sightings.  There are still a couple of areas on the lake that are clear for now, but not that I can see from my house.  I was up earlier than my usual, since my husband is still off from work, it being New Year's Day and all.  First birds I see are the pretty much daily visitors, the Red-breasted Nuthatches.  There are two of them, no three, no... four in all.  And a female Downy Woodpecker joins the group too.  Pretty common yard birds for me.

Decided to take a trip into Spokane, have some lunch and visit with some old friends.  I see it as an opportunity to do some birding!  I grab my camera, just in case I see something exciting.  Wishing I didn't have to drive, but if I don't, I usually get car sick.  I would rather be logging any birds I might see.  My family doesn't like it when I'm driving and commenting on my bird sightings.  They feel I should be watching the road, but I can't help but observe nearby birds!  Today I was lucky, because my husband was handy, and I talked him into pressing the record button on my iPhone so I could voice record myself some memos of the birds I saw while I was driving, then I could add them to BirdLog and eBird later.  It worked out great!  

First bird sighting on the highway at the Loon Lake Summit, was an American Crow, and I saw two more just down highway 395 a bit into Clayton, and ended the day with 7 crows.  Figuring I would see several Red-tailed Hawks along highway 395, and I did.  A total of  9 of them between Clayton and Spokane.  Another given, was a Black-billed Magpie, they hang out around the Deer Park area.  It wasn't long before I saw a couple here and there and ended up with 6 magpies.  Surprise sighting of at least a dozen Rock Pigeons around Burroughs Road.  Some miscellaneous birds around town in Spokane were a gull of some sort at Wandermere, I thought possibly a California gull, but after looking at my iBird app, I think given the winter range, it is a Herring Gull.  Twelve black birds of some sort, possibly starlings.  BirdLog lists starlings, rock pigeons, and house sparrows as birds you may want to hide the sightings, because they are quite frequent.  

I talked hubby into taking the long way home so we could drive by Mt. Spokane High School to see if the Snowy Owl that I saw back at the end of November might still be around.  I bribed him with some coffee.  My assistant birder for the day!  We drove up Bigelow Gulch Road, which is where my husband grew up.  The old homestead is still there.  Spotted a couple of American Kestrels along Bruce road, and saw two huge groups of Canadian Geese, estimating 60 of them.  They were in the same spot as they were right before Christmas when we traveled to my sisters house.  Not too much farther was the Snowy Owl hang-out, but no Snowy in sight today. My best friend sent me the following email. Her son goes to Mt. Spokane High School where the Snowy Owl has been hanging out.

From the Mt Spokane High School Newsletter:

"WILD LIFE ON THE PRAIRIE CONTINUED

Henrietta (the snowy owl) is still with us and is most likely to be seen in the morning hours around 7 a.m. - 9 a.m. and afternoons from about 2 p.m. - 4 p.m. She is usually seen on the light and power poles looking for her prey in the fields south of the school."

So apparently she is still there, and her name is Henrietta!  Definitely going back!

After arriving back home in Loon Lake, I stopped the car at the wetland just a mile from our house.  It's not quite frozen yet, as this portion of the lake gets some sun during the winter.  There were 30 or so ducks in the dusky afternoon.  I wasn't sure that they were American Coots, thinking they were mostly black and had a little white on them.  Not enough white to be Common Goldeneyes like I had seen yesterday.  But after looking in iBird, I don't know what else they could be, so I logged them as Coots.  Probably the most exciting sighting, that I let out a gasp and a "What was THAT?", was the Wild Turkey, just one, that flew out of the woods and into a tree as we drove by on our private road.  I was hoping it was an owl!  Hubs said that our chihuahua Jack E. Cheez chased about a dozen turkeys right next to our house this morning when he let him outside.  So if I count my birding partners turkey sightings, than we have a baker's dozen turkeys for New Years Day!

All in all, it was a busy bird day with 11 species, and over 147 birds.  Didn't take any pictures on New Years Day, because I spent most of the time driving.  So first thing, the following day, January 2nd, I snapped the above photo of the Downy Woodpecker at the freshly filled suet.  Let this photo serve as a not very clear example of the photos I would like to be taking.  Heck, you can't even see her beak!  The photo below is of some Mallards I saw in Cedar Beau Bay, the only outing I had today.  Most of the lake is now frozen with a light layer of ice, except a couple of areas such as this.  I like how the bench is sticking out from the snow, welcoming you to come visit my winter wonderland!

My Big Year ~ 2013 Birding Project

I'm gearing up for my next big birding project, my Big Year!  I will be getting out of my comfort zone of watching birds from my balcony and around my home for the most part.  Getting out in nature and trying to visit as many of the Great Washington State Birding Trails (GWSBT) as I can, and observing as many bird species as I can.  I hope to add a few birds to my life list of just over 90 birds.  I plan on recording my sightings in eBird, an online checklist program by the National Audubon Society and Cornell Lab of Ornithology that lets you track the birds you see, keep track of your lists, and share your sightings with the community.  I've got my GWSBT map in the mail and the app on my iPhone to help find the birding trails, the iBird app for identifying the birds, and the BirdLog app and eBird for logging the birds!  I'm hooked up!

Yesterday, I played around with the BirdLog app and tested it out.  On my trip to town, I counted 6 Red-tailed Hawks along highway 395 between Clayton and Spokane.  It's amazing how I can spot em', even while driving, although my kids get mad at me... "Watch the road mom, not the birds"!  So while I was getting my hair done, I entered my sightings in the BirdLog app.

After I got home and settled, I reviewed my entries and submitted them to eBird.  It was fairly easy.  Can't wait for next week when I start entering ALL the birds I see!  The exciting thing about my Big Year project, is that even if I have seen the bird species before, it's like seeing it anew, because I will get to count them and add them to my lists, and report my sightings.  Not only will I have a life list, but will have a year list, a yard list, and on location lists.  Lots of lists!

Oh how I wish I had better camera equipment to document my sightings.  I have a FujiFilm Finepix HS10 with a 30x zoom, which does help out in the field to zoom in on those far off birds.  The photo quality is not the greatest.  I really want to concentrate on taking better photos, and using more manual settings.  But that is hard sometimes when you are out in the field and have to snap a quick photo before the darn bird flies off!  At the very least, I should be shooting at a quick shutter speed to capture the action of my feathered friends. I'll be bringing my tripod along to get those steady shots.

Recently I have been posting my blog on Google+, which is kind of like a photo sharing social site. If you happen to belong to Google+, be sure to look me up!  I belong to several birding communities and get to see lots of beautiful nature photography.  This has increased the traffic on my blog quite a bit.  Earlier this month, I was excited to have almost 900 pageviews (since starting my blog in June 2010) and looking forward to hitting 1000.  Now, I have surpassed 1200 views from all over the world!  I added a view counter here on the blog.  It's right above my life list on the right ---->

Lots of great technology to assist my 2013 Big Year!  I'm ready!

Now That's What I Call S-N-O-W-!

Tomorrow is the first day of winter, but I think someone forgot to tell Mother Nature because she sent the snow a bit early!  We live in a snow belt and got dumped on here in Loon Lake over the last couple of days... 29 inches over night!  No worries about having a white Christmas this year.  But I am a little worried that I didn't get my Christmas shopping done, and we have family festivities to attend, and driving into town (we live about 30 miles from the big city of Spokane) could be difficult to say the least.  Only one of our cars has snow tires, two have 4-wheel drive and my poor husband's van has neither.  He had to stay home from work today because there was just too much snow this morning to go anywhere, and someone has to dig us out!

The poor pets are having a hard time getting around in all of this snow.  You would think our chow Cubby Bears would be better at it then our chihuahua Jack E. Cheez, but no... Jack's not scared at all, it's Cubby who is the pansy!

Even the cat Stanley Oliver is fascinated with the snow.  He hopped and skipped right out in the deep snow and over to under the picnic table.  Getting back he wasn't so bouncy.

Earlier this week, we didn't have quite as much snow, but enough to cover the ski docks.  There was one day that a Great Blue Heron spent most of the day roosting on the ski dock, sleeping as it snowed. 



This isn't the first time I've seen the heron out in a snow storm.  A couple of years ago, when the fish pen was in the bay over the winter, the resident Great Blue Heron named Bruchis would hang out daily.  Check out this video I took of Bruchis in a snow storm...



Bird Lady Blog Activity

I've been reviewing my stats on my Bird Lady Blog and was excited to see I have almost 900 pageviews since my blog started in June 2010, 87 views last month, and 37 this week.  It's surprising to see the different countries my readers are from... the United States of course, Poland, Germany, United Kingdom, Russia, Canada, Latvia, South Korea, China, India, Guam, Philippines, Brazil, and South Africa. 

I'm trying to give my blog some badly needed attention, and with my new Great Washington State Birding Trails project for the new year, I hope to increase my posts and my audience.  Shooting for 1000 pageviews! 

To my readers, thank you for checking out my blog.  One thing I would like is to get more comments from you on my blog.  My faithful reader Jana D. always leaves me a comment :O) 

Thanks for stopping by!

~ Sherrie (Bird Lady)

Little Hawks & Birding Trails

*2/12/13 UPDATE:  I have discovered that American Kestrels are falcons, not hawks!

The cutest and littlest hawks are American Kestrels.  While I was searching for the Snowy Owl this week (see previous blog post), I happened to see an American Kestrel, but didn't get any photos of it, so I posted one from my archives.  Well today I went back up to Mt. Spokane High School to see if I could see the owl again and get some more pictures since I really only got one close up.   The owl wasn't there, so again I continued on towards Mt. Spokane thinking perhaps I would see the Red-tailed hawks that were out that day and could try and get some pictures of them.  But no, the Red-tails weren't out either.  I did see some American Kestrels though, and since I only have two pics of a Kestrel, I was going to get me some more!  This time, I had my sunroof opened, camera ready, no cars behind me as I was traveling down the road.  When I got close enough, I zoomed in, and off it would fly.  Usually not very far though so I would followed it the short distance, and again try to snap a photo, but by the time I would get zoomed and focused, it would take off again.  I managed to get a few shots, but not as close, or sharp, or as many as I would have liked.  As I was loading the Kestrel pics to my computer when I got home, I looked more closely at them and noticed that the little hawk I was chasing had a poor little rodent that it was trying to eat in peace.  It is in every picture I took of the bird!  I love seeing things like that when you finally get the time to look at the pictures in detail on the big screen. 

Here is the first picture I got, a silhouette of the American Kestrel, that made me think, what's he got there?

The next one clearly shows that the little hawk has a rodent for a snack, and I am interrupting the feast.  No wonder he kept flying off.

This pic below is a little clearer and shows how pretty these tiny hawks really are.



I decided that trying to take photos from the road was probably not the best or safest way to do this.  So I turned off on a graveled road that I vaguely remembered from the other day, but this time I read the sign better.  It was called Feryn Ranch Conservation Area and I drove over 1/2 a mile on the gravel road to the parking area to investigate.  I was surprised to see a sign that said it was part of Audubon Washington's The Great Washington State Birding Trail.  Palouse to Pines Loop. 

Below you can see more of the habitat... 168 acres of wetland, meadow, and fields with Ponderosa Pines.  I want to go back and do some hiking and see what other birds I can find.

Recently, my husband and I took a weekend trip to Leavenworth and while we were there we did some walking along the Wenatchee River and I remember it being part of the Cascade Loop.  Now I'm seeing the Palouse to Pines Loop.  I thought to myself, I'll have to do some research about these Loops when I get home, see if they are related and what they are all about. 

Come to find out there are 7 'loops' in The Great Washington State Birding Trail.  There are 51 birding trails that make up the Palouse to Pines Loop.  Feryn Ranch Conservation Area is number 5 in the loop.  The last trail listed just happened to be 51 Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge, near Cheney, WA which I have visited twice with a friend of mine.  Last time we were there in Spring of 2010, we saw two baby Great Horned Owlets with their mamma in an abandoned Osprey nest.  Great sighting! 

The walk my husband and I took along the Wenatchee River in Leavenworth, WA I found out was part of the Cascade Loop, 15 Waterfront Park.  This bear warning was posted at the start of trail.

The autumn colors were at their peak at this time of year (the end of October), so the entire trip was full of the beautiful seasonal colors, and was one of the main reasons we went on this getaway.  I had hoped to get in more birding, but the weekend was rather rainy, and even here in these pictures, we are walking in the rain.



I also discovered that another park we stopped by on the way home from Leavenworth, Wenatchee Confluence State Park, was the 17th destination trail on the Cascade Loop. 

So already I have visited four of these birding trails, without realizing it at the time, with the exception of Turnbull, which I visited specifically to go birding and knew it was a recognized birding trail.  I'm off to a good start!

Now that I know about the Great Washington State Birding Trail, I have decided to start a new project.  I plan to start visiting these birding hotspots, and tracking all the birds I can find.  I recently signed up for eBird, and plan to also start recording my sightings through that at the beginning of the year.  After 20+ years of birding, I have only recorded about 90 or so different species of birds here in Washington, where there are 346 annually recorded bird species.  So my goal this year will be to get as many new species as I can and going out of my comfort zone and explore as many of these birding trails as I can.  For those of you who aren't familiar with the movie The Big Year,  Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman and Owen Wilson are bird enthusiasts who compete to try and become the world record-holder in a year-long bird-spotting competition.  2013 is gonna be my "Big Year"!