This weekend is the Great Backyard Bird Count, which started yesterday and goes through Monday, where people from around the world count birds and submit their data for research. But counting my finches and redpolls seems like an impossible task with them coming and going so quickly to the feeders and back to the trees.
Counting Birds
It seems like when the temperature finally gets above zero, then it snows like this morning. And the wind is blowing the snow sideways as well as making it hard for the birds to land on the feeders except for the feeder which the gray squirrel as commandeered (who is now a white squirrel with all the snow gathering on his back since he has been squatting for a while as I gave up chasing him off after the fourteen time).
But since it still below freezing, the bears should at least be hibernating yet so maybe the birds will be able to use this feeder since the squirrel hasn’t climbed the pole yet. This feeder disappeared last spring when the bear broke the pole and ran off with the feeder. It took a while before I found it behind a brush pile in the woods and the bear must have eaten a lot of seeds that day since he left some big brown piles on my lawn!
Snowy Bird Cafe
The birds were busy visiting the bird seed feeder today, even the young nuthatch, who took multiple tries to land on the feeder. The nuthatch get their common name from their habit of jamming large nuts and acorns into tree bark, then whacking them with their sharp bill to “hatch” out the seed from the inside.
Young Nuthatch
