Interesting Positions

I decided to sit on the front deck today. It’s a small deck, but the birds don’t mind me if I’m not being an obvious nuisance. A little Black-capped Chickadee did the neck twist, and a juvenile Grackle posed for me. (The juveniles are easy to spot, because they are mostly brown. This was one was just coming into adult colours.) Click for full size.

IP

IPa

© C. Ford. All rights reserved.

Kookaburra and Persimmon

From Lofty. First up, Kookaburras, and oooh, pretty dinosaurs they are. Thanks, Lofty!

Two pics of the resident Kookaburra clan, getting their morning feed from my wife. On the advice of our local vet they get dog food pellets, soaked in boiling water for 5 minutes and drained. There are never any left after a dozen kookas hoover them up.

Koo1

Koo2

A Persimmon tree and fruit.

A couple of pics of one of our few successful fruit harvests this year. The persimmon tree, after spending three months under bird netting, yields three full buckets of fruit. Harvested and pruned back severely, the tree sheds its last few leaves on a damp Autumn morning. A row of persimmons sits on the window sill to ripen a bit longer.

Pers1

Pers2

Photos © Lofty. All rights reserved.

Wings on Wednesday: Mourning Dove

I have a great fondness for Mourning Doves (Zenaida macroura), and we used to have a good population of them on property. Then the Eurasian Collared Doves (Streptopelia decaocto) arrived. The Collared Doves are considerably larger, and serious bullies. I’ve been missing the Mourning Doves for around a year and a half now, but they are coming back, and I’m so happy about that. I hope our nesting mums come back too, it’s a wondrous thing to watch baby doves outside my studio window. Click for full size.

WW1

WW2

© C. Ford.