My Favorite Time of the Year in Everyday Ramblings

This may look like a boring old late winter wetland field but on Saturday we saw the most amazing things in and over it. :)

A pair of Northern Harriers (they used to be called Marsh Hawks) repeated a mating display called a Sky Dance three times while we were wandering around near this field. They are large striking looking birds in that they are different colors. The male is a blue gray with black wing tips and a white rump. This female was a dark chocolaty brown with a rusty orange upper chest and shoulders and the white rump too. They have the same type of facial disks as owls do and hunt low to the ground in open fields.

This day they were more interested in each other. The male would fly straight up with his wings angled back like a falcon and then dive straight down and then start this spinning tumbling wing to wing roll over as if it were an air show but this display was just for her and at one point she reciprocated. We were all just transfixed. It is a pretty rare sight and we were lucky to be at this place at this time.

My bird class and I were out in the marshy area around this field for a good four hours and had no problem keeping busy and out of trouble. Our teacher had been out the day before and was able to take us right where we would see a Northern Shrike. They are very very bad boy birds in that they don’t have the talons or beaks to break necks or disable prey so they hang out on thorny bushes or barbed wired and impale their catch. Our guy was just hanging out on a very thorny bush. We didn’t need to witness any feeding behavior.

A whole bunch of Great Blue Herons, who are so big and awkward in flight, one can’t help but be convinced in a flash that birds are modern day dinosaurs were getting together to build their rookery for the year here.

And just to make Kes jealous we saw a number of pairs of Kestrels (they used to be called Sparrow Hawks). They look different from each other too but there was glare and it was hard to distinguish them until one pair actually mated in front of us, and our teacher asked, so now can you tell which one is the male?” We all laughed. It was a great outing and I very much enjoyed chatting with the teacher both ways about online dating vs. real life encounters. I genuinely like her and she knows her birds.

Next Sunday I am giving up my Yoga for Hormone Therapy class, which I am also very much enjoying (I have handouts for what I am going to miss) to go on an all day birding outing to a big wildlife refuge near where Kes and Most Honorable live.

I have this big stack of bird books and I have been doing my homework, looking at Taxonomy (mostly Genera) and learning all kinds of stuff. We heard a Pileated Woodpecker but didn’t see him. They are the large (mostly black with white accents woodpeckers) with the red punk head crest that Woody Woodpecker is drawn from. They are the only woodpecker in the Genus Dryocopus Pileated in the Western United States.

Okay okay, before your eyes glaze over…I start teaching my caregiver class week after next and so am enjoying a little down time here this week, which I very much appreciate.

My oldest sister is still in the hospital and probably will be until this weekend. She is still struggling and miserable and grumpy and ever so slowly getting her strength to sit up and move around a little back. She is on a fall watch and is not allowed to get out of bed on her own. This is driving my very independent sister nuts. The doctor is worried about her lungs and we are worried about infection as there are super bugs in hospitals these days just looking for a weak vessel to take root in…

Continued good thoughts her way would be much appreciated.

Only three days until the spring equinox! My favorite time of the year. When we have light... it is spectacular.