White-throated Sparrow

And we continue on with our march of birds to the small garden as I haven't been able to take a day trip out of the city.

Another LBJ, this time it is a white-throated sparrow. We only get them in the winter as they breed in Canada and the northern most parts of New England.

Hopefully a day trip will be coming up as they are not predicting any snow, just regular North Carolina winter weather.

First Presbyterian Church Bell Tower in the Snow

I'm always a little surprised to find that I have readers on my blog outside of the 12 of you who have decided to follow me, although it is an extremely pleasant surprise when someone shows up out of the blue and comments on a post.

One of those out-of-the-blue commentators is Dan Degraaf who lives down in Salisbury, about 50 miles south of Greensboro. He left a very nice comment about the background of the First Presbyterian Church Bell Tower back in October and has offered before pictures of the Salisbury train depot (which has been wonderfully restored) when I get an opportunity (and the weather cooperates) to go back and take more snapshots of his hometown.

Dan sent me this terrific picture of the bell tower in Sunday's snow that I want to share with you all:

Thank you, Dan!

The Bird Who is Practicing to Become a Bat

I'm not sure what this little wren is doing - practicing to become a bat? There certainly isn't any bird seed up in the patio umbrella for him to eat. The bird feeders are a good eight feet away from there.

Carolina Chickadee

One more bird in snow snapshot for the week. 


This is a Carolina chickadee, the closest bird that I have here to the family of birds called tits in the UK.  And looking at pictures of the Marsh tit, it looks almost identical to the Carolina chickadee. In fact, tits, chickadees and titmice belong to the same family, Paridae. Type in "Chickadee" into Wikipedia and it automatically takes you to the listing for tit. Not quite a blue tit (which I long for), but the closest that I'll get here in North Carolina.

Carolina Wren

This snow brought some excellent snapshot opportunities for me. First, as you might have noticed, I replaced the header with a new one of a dark-eyed junco on a snowy redbud branch. I also got a Carolina wren to stop for a moment so that I could take a picture that wasn't a brown blur (those of you who are familiar with wrens know they are frantic little bundle of feathers).

The two pictures brought to mind a question that was asked and answered on the Web -  Why don't birds' feet freeze? Here's a good explanation why:

Birds actually use several tricks to keep their legs from freezing. First they can stand on one leg and pull the other up under their feathers when one leg starts getting too cold. And if it gets really cold, they can squat to cover both legs with breast feathers. If you see a bird doing this, they may be getting uncomfortably cold legs.

Also birds’ feet are mostly bone and tendons, so unlike mammals, they have a limited supply of nerves, blood vessels or muscles to freeze. Their feet are also covered with scales [Me: Just like the reptiles which they descended from] which isn’t a living tissue and less susceptible to freezing.

 Finally, birds don’t have sweat glands in their skin to produce any moisture to freeze. Heat and moisture are accumulated in sacs, transferred to the lungs and eliminated through the mouth. No moisture escaping through their feet is also the reason they don’t stick to metal perches in the winter.

And now you know the reason birds' feet don't freeze!

The Day After Christmas

For those of you who wondered how Greensboro fared in our largest Christmas snowstorm ever (6 inches and counting), a picture of the small garden Sunday morning.

And to All a Good Night

(I'll be back Monday)

A Kaleidoscopic Christmas

I've sort of ground to a halt on snapshots for the blog. I'm tired of birds, the weather isn't cooperating and I'm trying to get ready for Christmas.

So, I'm falling back on an old standby, the kaleidoscope plug-in.

Here's the Christmas tree done up for the season.

Baltimore Oriole

All of a sudden a bird who is supposed to be with the rest of his species in South America for the winter has started to show up at my feeders along with all the other birds who stay here year-round.

I have a Baltimore oriole coming to the feeders daily along with my wrong-way red-bellied woodpecker who still refuses to even look at the suet cakes. This time of year Baltimore orioles have already migrated to the southern part of Central America or the northern coastal areas of South America. They are definitely not year-round birds or boreal migrators who normally come to the small garden.

With more wintry weather predicted for this weekend I am making sure that all the feeders are completely filled and that the water in the two bird baths are not frozen over. Here's hoping my oriole makes it through the winter.

Christmas Lights

Someone decided to do something different for their outdoor Christmas lights. I find it fascinating, although I'm not sure what the large pinwheel-type objects are. Stars? Flowers?

The Picnic Shelter at the Mayo River State Park. Mayodan, North Carolina

No more birds at least for a couple more days. TB wasn’t available to travel this Saturday and with the weather forecast calling for snow, I decided to stay home. The snow never showed up and Sunday was bright and sunny although very cold and breezy. I decided to take a short drive up to Mayodan to the newest North Carolina state park, the Mayo River State Park.

From July 3, 1948 until the early 1970s, the site was operated as a community park. The original park owner, former textile giant Washington Mills Company, commissioned internationally renowned architect Antonin Raymond, a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright, to design the park and its recreational buildings. Raymond's architectural design was intended to blend with the densely wooded surroundings. After working in Japan for a number of years on projects such as the famous Imperial Hotel, Raymond returned to the United States and opened a firm with partner Ladislav Rado. The park's massive picnic shelter, historically renovated, reflects Raymond's Japanese-style architectural influence.

The cedar-shingled picnic shelter was built of hickory logs left in their natural state and used in combination with local stones and boulders. During the summer the shelter was left open to the elements, while during the winter a series of removable wooden shutters similar to Japanese Amado enclosed the shelter. The spectacular interior roof truss system which drew on Raymond’s designs in prewar Japan – particularly his St. Paul’s Catholic Church at Karuizawa (1934-35) – was left exposed. (p. 59) – Crafting a modern world: the architecture and design of Anotonin and Noemi Raymond, by Kurt Helfrich, 2006

I found these before pictures on H.M. Kern's website so that you can appreciate how much restoration work was done to bring this picnic shelter back to life:

And how the picnic shelter looks today:

A tiny little architectural gem in the rural Piedmont.

Purple Finches

It has been an incredibly cold and wet end of fall these past couple of weeks. I've stood by the sliding glass door in the dining room and counted the types of birds coming to the  feeder. So far, I've had cardinals, house finches, dark-sided juncos, goldfinches, mourning doves, blue jays, bluebirds, downy woodpeckers, red-bellied woodpeckers, Savannah sparrows, song sparrows and Carolina wrens among the daily visitors to the small garden.

How small is the garden, you ask. Well, for those of you who are familiar with Marie Viljoen and her blog, the garden area is about the same size as her terrace. I do have a patio where I have a few container plants which adds an area of 20 x 10 to the small garden. But I don't have any feeders on the patio.

At breakfast this morning, I added a couple more birds to the list above; an Eastern Towhee and a couple of Purple Finches. No pictures of the towhee but some slightly out-of-focus snapshots of the purple finches next to a house finch.

People have a tendency to confuse house finches with purple finches. House finches do have a rosy to purple color, but as you can see from the photos (sorry for the reflection from the sliding glass door), the purple finch is really purple, plus they are quite stocky compared to the house finch. But, according to the Cornell University website, they are losing out to house finches in territory. This, in fact, is the first time I've seen purple finches at the feeders in the eight years I've lived here.

These next three pictures really illustrate the behavior that All About Birds' website describes:

Aggressive Purple Finches show their agitation by leaning toward their opponent, neck stretched out and bill pointed at the other bird. This can intensify to standing upright, opening the beak or pointing it downward at opponent, and sometimes results in actual pecking attacks.

The two birds, center and left, are purple finches and the one on the right is a house finch.

Red-billed Leiothrix

I will never ever become a famous bird photographer (not that it was ever a career goal  anyway). I just couldn't adjust the apeture and focus fast enough to get  good snapshots of the birds in the zoo's avairy. The vast majority of photos got sent to the deleted items folder; this was one of the better ones and I think it's terrible compared to the ones I've taken of the birds that come to my small garden.

This is a Red-billed Leiothrix, also known as a Pekin Robin or a Pekin Nightingale. Those two last names are misnomers as they are not related to either Old World robins or nightingales. They are a common bird found throughout Southeast Asia and China.

Happy Holidays to You!

No color editing here - it's the real deal. I love how this male cardinal justs pops in contrast to the limbs and seed pods on this crepe myrtle.

Happy Holidays to Everyone!

Eclectus Parrot

Would you believe that I walked right under this parrot and never would have noticed him if another visitor hadn't pointed him out for me.

I've never heard of an Eclectus Parrot. According to Wikipedia, this is a female Eclectus as the male is bright green. In fact, for the longest time (since birds are so hard to sex), it was thought that these were two distinct species. No other bird species has this extreme of color difference for male and female.

This particular female is the subspecies Eclectus roratus vosmaeri, known as the Vosmaer's Eclectus.  It is larger in size than the main subspecies of Eclectus with more yellow in its plumage. It is found on islands in the North Maluku province of Indonesia.

Definitely not a little brown job!

Amazon Lily

No birds today. Flowers, instead!

Since the aviary at the zoo is replicating a tropical forest, it is also planted with 60 different plant species from tropical areas all over the world. One of the plants that was blooming this past Saturday was an Amazon Lily. It can be grown in Zones 10-11, or the extreme southern areas of states such as Florida or can be kept indoors in all other zones.

I read at Plant Files that one woman has had an Amazon lily plant since the 1950's, so it seems to be an extremely long-lived plant under the right conditions.

A Bird at (Di's) Feeder

For Dinahmow as she said that she had ibis visit her feeder there in Australia.

My guess is that she had the Australian White Ibis and this is a Scarlet Ibis which is only found in the Caribbean. Sorry, Di, it was the only Ibis in the aviary and unfortunately not a very good shot. I didn't use a flash inside as I didn't want to scare off the birds, there is no artificial lighting and the sky was very overcast. I did set the exposure to compensate, but it caused the picture to not be as sharp as I wanted.

A Bird at the Feeder

Not.

We went to the North Carolina Zoo as our Saturday day trip as it is only 45 minutes down the road and we could get in and out in a few hours.

We were only two of 24 visitors that day. I mean, who is going to go to an outdoor zoo in 30 degree weather except for crazy people. I only wanted to hit one exhibit which was indoors and of course, was the aviary.

This is a Chilean flamingo, a bird whose range is from the middle of Chile down to Tierra del Fuego so it can withstand the colder winter temperatures outdoors here in North Carolina unlike its Caribbean cousins. It is on the IUCN's red list and rarely breeds in captivity.

Decorating for Christmas

A close up of the Christmas tree in the lobby of my mom's independent living facility. Someone really has the decorative eye, don't they?

Off for our Saturday day trip. I hope this time I don't do anything to TB's car as the weather is supposed to turn wet and cold late in the afternoon and I don't think she wants another towing charge.

My Mother's Cat

We have always been cat people. There have been very few times in my life that I have not had cats living with me (always at least two and currently three).

My mother's move to an independent living facility was determined by whether or not they allowed pets as she wasn't going to move without her cats. At the time she was planning her move, she had three cats, but when she finally moved into her apartment, she was down to one due to the deaths of the other two; one from very old age and the other from a fast moving cancer. Annie, her Maine Coon, then developed a serious heart problem (one that seems to be congenital to the breed) and had to be put down the beginning of the year.

Mom was torn between not having a cat or adopting one and wondering about its fate if she died before the cat did. After I reassured her that I would take the cat if that happened, she then adopted Callie from a local animal rescue group.

Miss Imperious here -