Tuesday, November 23, 2010

You Know it Cold When

 You know its really cold when red-breasted nuthatches and
White-breasted Nuthatches snuggle tree trunks.

You know its really cold when finches look like round christmas ornaments.
 Female finch.
Male finch all fluffed up.

 Even Junco's are sheltering from the cold in the evergreen trees 
and puffing up in the shrubbery gathering early morning sun-rays.

Black-cap Chickadee fluff-ball ornaments.
 Most of all you know its real darn cold when the berries freeze to your beak!

Fluffy male House Sparrow. These are illegals, european immigrants which were imported and released onto the continent mid 1850 and are now wide-spread much to the detriment of natural songbird species.

 Cold cold morning sunshine, I never bothered to check the temperature till mid afternoon, by then it was up to a balmy -20 Celsius.
Finches decorating the neighbours tree mid-afternoon.
Last year we put out a pop-bottle seed feeder which worked wonderfully except greedy female finches clashed beaks like crazy attempting to keep other females from the feeder. This summer Gerald scored a brand-new 3 level seed-feeder at a garage sale for $5.00. Now many more finches can get to the seeds without major clash-on-wing brawls happening which is good as the cold snap has brought a multitude of varied birds to the feeder as you can see by the photos.
My last wee sweet little guests dropped by as the light was waning. Which I believe to be Pine siskins.
I will have to post them tomorrow as the server keeps rejecting my last few images.
May warm hugs keep the frosty cold at bay.

3 comments:

Carol Blackburn said...

Hi Teresa, such beautiful photos. Love the little birds. And your photo of the one with the little red berry stuck to it's beak was so touching, I sort of chuckled but really felt bad for the little one. Such a mixed emotion. It was both cute and so sad.

tess stieben said...

It was quite comical to watch as he looked like a circus clown, it took about 2 minutes of working at it to remove it. I felt sorry for a nuthatch who's toenail got caught in a clump of its frozen fur, it took that poor wee one much longer to set itself right.

john said...

It is so seldom that I get to rub it in about the weather. Our Alaska daytime temps have been running in the 40's f. All our snow is melting. It's a short-lived reprieve no doubt. Absolutely wonderful photos. I do feel so sorry for the birds in winter.