Wordless Wednesday
Tag Archives: yard
Orange you glad…
Most years the orioles arrive at my feeder around May 5. Hummingbirds too. But a friend of mine, living about an hour west of me, had an oriole on her feeder Easter Sunday!
So I put my feeder up a few days ago and Friday evening, during an hours long torrential downpour, my first oriole visited! I wasn’t sure I saw him, –it was getting dark and the rain was coming down in sheets.
I didn’t get a photo.
But the next morning, after I went out and emptied the water from his feeder and filled it up with grape jelly, he showed up!
He was still skittish and I got no images, but I stayed very still, holding Penny tight, and watched him eat his fill.
And late in the afternoon, as I stood across the room, I saw him again. My camera was within reach and I got these images, focus soft, but capturing the joy I felt to see him here.
And guess what? Later in the evening I realized there are TWO of them here! They chased each other around the beach tree which acts as the landing area for all birds visiting our feeders.
I can’t wait to set the camera on it’s tripod and use a remote shutter release. We’ll see what we shall see.
And today the hummingbird feeder goes up. If the orioles are here, the hummingbirds are too.
It’s early, but we’re ready!
We’ve had such crazy weather, things began to pop up in my garden earlier than normal. The red winged blackbirds were here early, too, and had to endure a few snowstorms after their arrival.
Everything seems early.
And now, a college friend, who lives about the same latitude as me and about an hour west of here, has had her first baltimore oriole visit! The males always come north first, scouting I suppose, and there he was, sitting on her feeder Easter Sunday!
I usually put up my oriole and hummingbird feeders the first week in May. But today, on the 22nd of April I went down to the basement, grabbed my oriole feeder, and filled it with grape jelly. I stood in the door to my deck, surveying my birdfeeder domain, and wondered how to rearrange things so that the oriole feeder would be prominent.
Eventually I decided to move the suet to another hook on the other side of the house and put the oriole feeder front and center, out in the sunshine where it would attract attention. I worried somewhat that the suet, being moved, wouldn’t be found by the birds who have grown dependent on it. But I figured it was almost past suet time and they should be out looking for bugs or something.
Then I sat down to write this post intending to document when I put the oriole feeder out. As I sat I glanced out a window and saw a female downy woodpecker contentedly chowing down on the suet in it’s new location.
I guess I don’t need to worry about my birds. If there’s food, they will find it. But when they’ve finished this batch of suet I’m taking that feeder down for the summer and putting the hummingbird feeder up. If the orioles are on their way the hummingbirds won’t be far behind.
Spring has, indeed, sprung.
Love my goldfinches
I’m really enjoying the goldfinches this spring. Some years we don’t see many, but this years there’s an abundance of them.
I’ve watched as the males turn from an army green, similar to the color the females stay year round, into their exuberant and brilliant summer gold.
They sit in the beech tree not far from the finch feeder and sing for their supper. If there are a lot of them in the tree I know that the feeder is probably nearing empty.
They don’t tolerate it getting too low.
They’re used to me being out there and don’t leave their tree, if the feeder is empty, even if Penny and I are on the deck.
They are picky and only really like the finch food I buy from a specialty bird store in the town just north of us. The employees there know me.
The finches are so much fun to watch, though they are eating me out of house and finch food!
Soon they’ll be busy raising their families and we won’t see so much of them. But they’ve sure brightened my spring!
Golden proof of spring
Here in Michigan spring can be a long time coming. Oh, I definitely have specific things that herald winter’s exit, like the sound of red winged blackbirds and singing frogs hanging at the pond across the street.
And there are the marsh marigolds brightening up banks of our local streams.
Still, we know that the snow could return any day, and likely will. We dream of warmth and trilliums, still a few weeks away.
Goldfinches turning yellow are a definite sign we’re finally on our way out of the gray, cold weather.
In the winter both the male and female goldfinches are an olive green. But once the weather warms up the males start to sport bright yellow feathers. I began to notice the color change last week, even as the icy rain continues.
Today I glanced up and my finch feeder was full of birds, all cold and hungry. You can see the patchy yellow on the male birds.
I could feel sad about all the grey skies and cold rain. But it’s impossible to feel down when my finches are turning gold!
Spring is here, I’m positive. And I dare mother nature to even think about snowing on us now!
Pretty things
Sometimes when the news is heavy, when it seems like it’s been heavy for weeks and months…
…and the winter sky seems dark and dull…
..and sunshine is so fleeting you stop and stare when, for a moment, there are shadows on the snow….
…then it’s extra important to slow down and enjoy the beautiful things that are all around us.
When stuff doesn’t go right
I’m in another one of my funky, can’t figure out how to do stuff, phases. You know how it is (or maybe you don’t), you’re bee-bopping along doing stuff you’ve always done and suddenly something doesn’t click.
Sometimes literally.
Earlier this month I questioned whether I should print my blog, as a way to preserve it. Several of you had ideas, and others of you had wondered about their own blogs, so were following along.
Last week I wandered around the PixxiBook site, (thanks Linda!) a company that prints blogs into hard covered books with a really easy interface. They have options of choosing which posts you want to print, or you can choose a specific time period.
My issue is, and always will be, the size of my blog. I’ve been writing here since 2006, with over 3,300 posts. Still I was curious.
So, after a few days of thought, I put my URL into their ‘go ahead and try it’ box and it started to go to work. Pretty soon I could preview the results, and I enjoyed very much reading the first couple years of posts in the format the printed version would appear.
Back then I had no images, and the posts were shorter than my ramblings of today. It was fun to reread all about being in grad school as an older student.
Meanwhile the PixxiBook machine was still churning. When I finally backed out of the site several minutes later it had made it through 30% of my blog, indicated there would be 40+ books and the cost was edging up over $4,000.
I smiled, because obviously there’s no way I can ever afford to put my entire blog into hard covered books. It would be bigger than an encyclopedia set! But I will print a few years worth, perhaps those early days in school. And there is potential to just pull the Katie posts out and put them in one book, though I think that will take some work on my part.
Then, later in the week, I was working on a Christmas present, putting photos from a summer adventure into a photo book for someone and I was struggling!
Now, I’ve one projects like this a hundred times, but this time things felt different. I couldn’t find the book template I wanted to use, I couldn’t find the save button, though I remembered that while making my Penny 2025 calendar the system had saved on it’s own, so maybe that was it, I couldn’t get the photos imported…nothing was working the way I remembered it should work.
I spent a couple hours and got only a quarter of the book built when I had to stop for the day.
And, you guessed it, when I went back the next day nothing I had done had been saved. And I struggled all over again finding the pieces I needed to build the book. In the end I did the best I could and the book is designed and ordered and hopefully soon on it’s way to it’s forever home. But geeze.
AND during all this my Lightroom photo editing system decided I’d run out of storage. I have both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, which I pay a subscription for.
I’d always meant to use Lightroom Classic, because I don’t really want my photos to be stored by someone else in a cloud. But I accidently started with the cloud version, and I never wanted to stop and learn Lightroom Classic.
Franky, when I took the time to go explore Classic it seemed less intuitive and I couldn’t even figure out how to import a photo to it, so I stuck with the Cloud. But now my cloud is full and I really don’t want to pay more, especially with Classic sitting right there on my laptop. So I forced myself to figure it out.
And I’m slowly, very, very slowly, moving that way. I have edited the photos you see on this post using Classic. I’m not entirely happy.
And, speaking of not being happy, I have a new camera and I don’t have it all set up the way I want it yet. Because of course the new camera isn’t exactly like the old camera, otherwise, what would make it new.
Right?
So as I’m trying to take photos of this hawk that was hanging out on my deck and around my birdfeeders, terrorizing my little birds, I couldn’t get it to focus. That’s always been my problem with the Nikon Z series.
There’s a back of the camera focus button which I like to use v.s. using the shutter focus. I thought I had programed the camera to use the back button option, but while taking these photos, I’d focus using the back button, and when I actually pressed the shutter to get the shot it would REFOCUS and because there were so many branches it would focus on those instead of the bird.
Big sigh.
Lucky for me the hawk was concentrating on the little birds trapped in a briar bush below the deck and not me. He (or she) stood still for long periods of time. I finally just put the camera into manual focus and tried that way.
I still have to fix the focus problem, but that means figuring out more stuff. And I’m so tired of trying to figure stuff out these days. I might just go take a nap instead.
Here’s hoping you are having a much more productive and less frustrating month than I am!
Name this bird
Sitting at the dinner table last night I was watching the birds come for their own suppers. I had spread some black oilers on the deck railing and refreshed their bath water in anticipation of watching them while we ate.
The fresh water was a big draw as any number of birds showed up for a quick bath. Then this bird arrived. She didn’t look like any of my regulars.
Bigger than a gold finch, about the size of a warbler, but not a yellow warbler.
Greenish gold with darker wings and a little tuft on white near her shoulder.
Luckily my camera was right behind me on the kitchen counter, and the bird wasn’t upset by my reaching for it.
All these shots are through a window, with reflections splashed across the image.
I think, based on my Michigan bird book, it’s a female Evening Grosbeak.
We’re not supposed to have them around here, though they were here a couple of winters ago. Mostly they live way up north. So it could be something else.
What do you think?
Change Is Hard 