LEARN ABOUT CREATURES

today was warm - 60 - and i saw a dark brown, largish, butterfly near my house.

bunnies are totally nocturnal. so weird.

i saw many (3) bunnies hopping around in the middle of the night

at the feeder near my house i saw 2 little little birds. thought one might have been a female nuthatch, but really they were not. they were brown, some yellowish color - small, tiny stripes. drinking water. small like bushtits. SO cute.

it's finally warmer and i can walk my dog further.

we went all the way (which really wasn't very far) to the mississippi, and i saw a pileated woodpecker. these are really big woodpeckers...with an enormously bright red head.

today while waiting for the bus i heard two birds...which i think must be chickadees...but i'm not sure & haven't looked up their song yets. anyways, they were up in the trees and singing back and forth. HOWEVER, what was so weird is that it sounded like they were singing from the space place...i could only barely tell they were going back and forth.

so now i can pay more attention to this

i thought it was a fluke yesterday, but today i saw it again. there's squirrel fur all over the ground. some near my house, and some up the street. don't know if someone ate a squirrel, or if the squirrels are getting ready for spring -- or if the snow has melted and squirrel trash is everywhere.

today when the sun was starting to set a bunch of geese were flying south. do geese ever actually fly north, or do they just fly so far south they come back up around over the north pole. i mean really. why are the geese flying south... are these minnesota only geese? surely they are going to have to turn around soon and come back. surely winter is going to end, right?

saw 1 eagle flying overhead near Randolph & Cleveland in St Paul, and then another one the next day above the 46th street light rail station in Minneapolis.

How I could tell they were eagles

I was not born knowing how to tell the difference between hawks and vultures. In fact, I remember agonizing that I would never be able to figure it out. But what I did do was to meet people who could show me. I am particularly dense, so it took 5-20 people showing me, as well as looking at books, attending 'hawk walks' and going on many bird walks. Then I felt pretty sure that I could tell the difference between hawks and vultures.

People will tell you that vultures fly in a V shape ("dihedral" is what they will say) - and then they will start losing you because they go into talking about the "pitageals" on red-tail hawks. (This is because I lived in California and the most common large raptors are turkey vultures and red-tail hawks.)

In general, people will tell you that hawks fly flat. Of course, the hawk must be flying steady. Their wings are flat when they are gliding.

But in Minnesota, we have it much easier. Vultures, when you get used to seeing them, have white patches under their wings (these merely look lighter when seen from above.) But eagles have white on their heads & tails...so when the sun catches their heads, you see a glint of white front and back. That, with steady flat-winged gliding, is how I could tell I saw eagles from a distance.

You can also tell by habit -- vultures come out in the late morning usually. So if you see a large bird high up in the middle of the day...you are probably seeing a turkey vulture.