FLYday - Crow With Nest Material

American Crow, Corvis brachyrhynchos in flight with nesting material. Everybody is mating and building nests now!

April, Phippsburg, Maine

FLYday is an homage to what our feathered friends do best, fly.

Battle Serendipity - Red-tailed Hawk and Crows

Yesterday, I actually got to a job without being too distracted. However, while Weeding For Dollars, I was admittedly taking photographs and prepared to do so at the drop of a bird poop from the trees. Or, my hat, as it were. And let me tell you, Mister Man! It was a good thing I was or this whole event would have been lost to the history of mankind. This is a Red-tailed hawk being mightily harassed by a few crows. The one on the right that looks bigger might be a Raven. This battle went on for a few minutes as the hawk dodged and weaved and dove to try to shed the pesky varmints from its tail. As far as I know, RTs aren't nest robbers, so I'm not sure what this was about. Maybe crows just don't like any other dude on their corner for any reason. I was in Phippsburg when I took these shots. When I came home, I read my e mail as I usually do while waiting for my aching back to calm down. There's always lots of stuff from the Audubon List Serve bird reporters going at this time of year. Everyone's having palpitations about the warblers and everyone wants to be the first to report something rare. I must admit to some of the ego driven competitiveness myself. Plus, there is just the thrill of seeing the twitterers everywhere, rare or common. I didn't see anything rare yesterday. But I did catch this battle royal and lots of Baltimore Orioles and a lovely White-crowned sparrow. I'll share those in a separate post. Here is an unauthorized excerpt of one of the list serve e mails I read:
" Greetings, birding friends. Is it still called "birding" if there are no birds present? That was basically the deal on the Maine Audubon walk at Evergreen Cemetery this morning. Whew, it was dead. Deader than roadkill. We're talking slooooooooooow. And what few birds our group encountered, we couldn't see. They taunted us from the treetops or from deep in the scrub. The few birds we could hear, we couldn't quite identify. Their vocalizations were unfamiliar and possibly new to science. Until the wind picked up and we couldn't hear them anymore. By then, thankfully, it was time to say goodbye, sell my binoculars on eBay, and take up gardening."

I had to laugh as I saw what I did while gardening and captured it for everybody else. Tomorrow, I have a date with a fellow birder to go to Evergreen Cemetery. I bet I'll photograph something, anything, even if it's an interesting head stone. If I don't photograph something interesting, it will be because I'm not gardening.

 

This isn't an escort service. The Crow had dodged ahead of the hawk and doubled back on it.

Sick Of The Rain

Even the birds are sick of all the rain we've had. They sit around sulking. Ever seen a bird pout? Well I have. These crows appear to be a mated pair. The female is on the right, I think. She was grooming the boyfriend repeatedly. "Awe, come on, fella! You can make it! This will end soon, I promise. It always does. Don't let yourself go to pot over it."