Just Passing Through: Minnesota Backyard birds

This is also more photos than prose. Reason? The internet was out ( we had been warned of maintenance) and no TV either, my cold wouldn't let me sleep because for some reason I preferred to breathe without choking and I had to stay vertical for that. About the only thing to keep my interest was going through my photo library, which doesn't need internet. There is an easy way to order the files to be presented in order of first entered to last entered, one long solid block of - currently - something over 4,500 in the library. I had/have many more on thumb drives, but I wasn't up to fighting those to check out the damages from sitting in a hot PODS through part of an AZ summer. (Bad packing organization!) Some other day, more energy.

In the last couple days, for various reason, I've been going through various ones, sometimes finding what I wanted, sometimes not, but occasionally certain organizational themes popped out. If you read the three previous posts, you know what I mean. A lot of birds popped out along the way, and I separated them into two major piles. The first are from the back yard over the many years in Shafer. The second will be birds from either travels (when I can locate them... so just a plan at the moment) and depending on success it may or may not combine with Arizona birds. Fair warning: my bird identification guides mostly got purged with the AZ house library in a sale for the move, so not all may be correctly identified. Oh well. C'est la vie.

I'm starting with bird feeders. Winters require suet and seeds, maybe some fruits. Insects and worms have long gone dormant, but the environment often provides some varieties of sustenance, and humans who love watching birds (closer!) fill in the blanks.

This is our smallest woodpecker, the Downey. I love attracting them for the bit of red color. It's only in the males.

The female doesn't have it. Same feeder combo, different days, judging from amount of suet. On some quiet days, one can hear them rat-tat-tatting in nearby trees and know there are insects spending what they thought was a sleepy winter under the bark.

The nuthatch , a tad smaller than the Downy, hangs around where food is provided, and offers just a hint of tan color.

A larger bird, identified by its crest and beak color, is the female cardinal. They harvest fruits and seeds still clinging to branches out in the yard, like cranberry or cherry bushes, but usually are shyer about coming in close to the house.

Cardinals also like a platform feeder far back in the yard with a spread of seeds like sunflower, easy in/out for safety, and a good view of who's around. The males are a rare large spot of red in the winter, with their bolder color. If these shots were taken at the same time they might be a mated pair, but I only saw one here and another there, and they never confided their personal life stories to me.

Robins have been known as one of the first spring arrivals, and that has until recently always meant actual calendar spring. Perhaps 20 years ago I could spot some in winter around large company buildings which kept sidewalks heated to melt snow and ice. A few years later we could spot some in the yard once the snow melted off the cranberry bushes. The year we stopped snowbirding and moved back north for good they were already in the yard along with the snow. The cranberries had died out and not been replaced, but robins appeared in the tops of birches like this, where perhaps their seeds were useful.

A common suet feeder visitor in winter is something we very rarely see in summer, for whatever reason. When the trees were leafing out it was a surprise to see this junco duo up in the branches.

Chickadees are another common winter guest at the suet, and again, we tend to not see them in summer. So it was a surprise in the new place just after moving in around mid June that year to find a pair of these inhabiting a run-down bird house, using an attached second house as a perch. It was at the end of our parking spot so I'd just sit and watch from the car if there wasn't ice cream melting or something. This one had just arrived, on a day I actually remembered my camera, with a juicy yellow worm/caterpillar in its bill. It tried to juggle it a bit when landing, but it dropped to the ground. Oops. This is it looking - I like to think abashedly - at the hole just barely showing in the upper house where hungry young are waiting, before flying off to try again. The family was around about another three weeks. The post the two houses were attached to was rotting, so we removed the whole thing and gave it to a friend who wanted to repair/repaint it and set it up more securely in their own yard.

The old back yard was/is full of a variety of fruit trees and bushes. It should be no surprise that a frequent spring visitor is the cedar waxwing. It's also fairly shy - smart bird! - and often hangs out in a flock of robins and cardinals, all after the same leftover small fall fruits like cranberries when they first arrive in spring.

They stick around to purloin cherry and apple blossoms off newly blooming trees to ... help thin the fruit? Sure, that's it, thin the fruit to help the trees.

Summer birds have more resources, and while we know they are around, it's harder to find reasons for them to be close to the house where we can observe and shoot them. In recent years the back yard has been fairly neglected, unless it was being set up for a family party / bonfire / brats and s'mores roast. It used to be where family dogs played safely fenced, but none accompany us now. What does happen there is branches get collected, either to stack in piles for later burning, or one year just pile up loosely on a large plastic table, to be ignored till needed. So nobody realized what was happening there until one day when we were looking out the window and saw flashes of color.

I apologize for the quality, but some days it is all you can get. A story is its justification. There had been several young Baltimore orioles under the branches, and most were ready to fledge. A parent flew the short distance to the chain link fence, then another short distance to very productive bush cherries. It then flew back and forth, calling, encouraging the young to fly over to get their own food. First one followed, then a second. Meanwhile from the house, we were watching, trying to get photos, hoping not to scare everybody so we could continue to watch the fun and see how the parent was trying to teach a valuable lesson to its young. We humans got about a ten minute show until something or somebody startled them into disappearing. Only two young had approached, one stopping on the fence, but the other perched on a branch and was plucking at the fruit before it all ended.

We didn't see them again. At least the chipmunks in the yard don't scare that easily.

On the north border of the back yard has been a raspberry patch for many years. It's fenced, and on some of the poles we put up wood houses. Tree swallows took over the first few years, then wrens for a bit, then nobody... until one year we had a bluebird family!

Note that the boxes were too large, the posts too close, too urban, too... not bluebird preferred. But here we were. We happened to be having family over for one of those bonfires. The kids were kept back from that part of the yard - the s'mores were more fun anyway - and my camera caught some of the action. They are so rare in the conditions we offered them, that I just kept shooting. I'll let the sequence speak for itself.