LEARN ABOUT CREATURES

Hawk Outposts, Hawk migration New-England style

Posted by: Chacha

Mobs of cedar waxwings

Posted by: Chacha

for the past few days, the cedar waxwings have been getting louder and louder. they are in the tops of trees. very very high pitches. always in groups.

Young squirrels running around for the first time

Posted by: Chacha

Gardeners apparently getting started already?

Posted by: Chacha

I noticed that some of my neighbors have planted stuff already. How do they do it?

Kestrel, pelican, loud woodpeckers, so much spring

Posted by: Chacha

I'm being very bad here and not splitting my observations into discrete units. Perhaps we need multiple fields for our spring observations? That said this is what i've seen:

• kestrel on top of a sort of short tree (st.paul, from the bus)
• a pelican or egret flying (longfellow)
• more plants and small leaves
• EXTREMELY loud woodpecker
• a bird that looked like a nuthatch (bluish grey, crawling down a tree) i though it was a woodpecker...but that was probably somewhere else...
• a grey jay?
• yesterday i saw a robin in a tree in the park near my house, it was singing BUT it wasn't doing a very good job which reminds me that the adolescents are sometimes horrible singers and that is very cute.

green stuff sprung

Posted by: Chacha

my Geranium maculatum (wild geranium, native to MN) has 1 leaf chives are growing. i *think* the grass started growing. my little flax plant also has really cute baby leaves. yay it's really spring! oh, and i found nipped off elm buds with flowers. they are incredibly beautiful.

2 new tiny birds

Posted by: Chacha

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.

bunnies are back

Posted by: Chacha

bunnies are totally nocturnal. so weird. i saw many (3) bunnies hopping around in the middle of the night

chickadees singing back and forth

Posted by: Chacha

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

geese.

Posted by: Chacha

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?

Eagle-sighting, two days in a row. How I could tell they were eagles.

Posted by: Chacha

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.