Bird Watching!

Friend has had a Painted Bunting over-wintering at his place for the past three years now.
Very unusual for our area.

There are always birdwatchers over there... I told him he ought to open a hot dog stand :)
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I had no idea some locales allow and enable the selling and planting of invasives
 
It's baby season again! Today I had my first baby great horned owl return of 2019. It's 2.5 weeks old and the nest fell apart. Resident brought it into the Audubon center yesterday and today I brought it back and put up a new nest for it.
 

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I haven't seen a painted bunting in some forty years. Never common, but not too rare in the N. Carolina mountains back then.

Beauty, Brian. Great piece of work, sir.
 
Hella pic, Pigwot.

Skwerl that is quite thrilling. Great pic of the youngin, where was mama?
 
Cory, That wasn't my photo; mine look like crap, as all I had was a phone.

I was up with a friend looking at a log we were thinking of milling. On the way back he asked if I knew any birders. I said, uh, yes, like... my wife. He then said they had that Painted Bunting at their house every winter for three years now. I told him she had heard last winter that it was in that general area and had looked for a long time but never found it. When she heard it was at Chuck and Cathy's place we went right out, and she was duly rewarded. One person said, "That bird looks like someone dunked it in five different paint cans".
 
I heard a weird noise when I got outside to bring some firewood in.
Turned out about 100 Whooper swans had touched down on the neighbour's field for a bit of foraging, and were whooping away..

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Good pic Stig, we had some storks stop off for a pit stop in a field the other day. Road too busy to stop and snap though.
 
Been protected since the 50es.
We 'bout lost all our swans during the hard winters of WW2.
We were at one time down to very few pairs of Mute swans.
Now they are all over.
 
They can be pests here, on the West coast.
Been talk of letting hunters at them again.
Problem is, the ones that are a winter pestilence are migrants, so they belong to some other country.
Don't really want to go shooting someone elses swans.
 
I learned our year-round hummingbirds are Anna's hummers, and the visiting ones are Rufous hummers.

The Anna's I've seen a lot, but not the flash of red that is hard to see. The customer today has a water feature by the front door. We were discussing this and that, and it showed up. She says they surf in the water in the summer. Lots of fresh water is frozen up, so the hummer came for a drink in the running water.

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I need to put up some feeders.
 
We're having to bring the hummer feeders in at night now, frozen solid if I forget. And then the Anna's are pissed off and complain to me when I get firewood in the morning :).
 
Like Sean was saying, here the Rufus migrate, but the Anna's are year round residents. I don't know how they manage in really cold weather, but they do.
 
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