We have birds now that we usually don't have visit until March or later. House finches are showing up pretty regularly. This morning we had a small flock of meadowlarks in the front lawn.Pretty birds, and very welcome, but also very unexpected!
Thanks for your bird reports @marlingardener. I enjoy them very much! Here, I mostly see finches, chickadees, and Stellar Jays. And hummingbirds stay all winter too.
Daniel, we don't have Stellar jays, and our hummingbirds go south for the winter. We take the hummingbird feeders down in late October or in November. We love seeing our chickadees almost all year around.
I like this little bird as well. We have a bird here that looks a little like that chickadee, the glanskop. Mate, I could look at your bird fotos all day long.
Clay, I wish more people were as kind as you, feeding birds. We have cardinals all year around. They sure do eat a lot! They like the seed and the suet. Greedy little feathered friends.
There has been a pair of barn swallows who nest on the light shade on the porch . Don’t they know they are barn swallows and there is a barn nearby.
Must be the global warming, hummingbirds always flew south when I was growing up, in Washington. I remember one summer my grandpa found a nest. It was so small! We had Cardinals build a nest in the arborvitaes between our house and next door. My granddaughter watched as the babies learned to fly.
The hummers have over winter here for many years . The hummers go into a semi hibernation state called Topor .It’s a sleep-like state allows them to conserve their energy by lowering their body temperature. Some drop 50° below their normal 102°-104° temperature. In conjunction with a lowered body temperature, their heart rate also becomes sluggish.
Maybe that's what they did, and I just thought they went south because I never saw them. Aren't you in Canada? That would be further north than I was. When I got older I didn't have my grandparents to entice them and my mom just didn't do it. I was in 7th grade when I lost my grandpa and younger for my g'ma. My grandma was the one that always put the feeders out. We had some really good snows back then. I remember ice skating on my grandpa's peat bog, one year, and another year watching him sweep the ice cycles down, that went from the roof to the snow. Then one of the last years sledding with friends, we had really hilly roads. People here wonder why stuff shuts down there. But we had a lot of steep hills that they don't have here.
Willow.. located in Oregon. We have good memories about our grandparents too. . There are step hills here too. Oregon is not prepared for ice and snow storms. 100’s of trees fell swamping contractors and loggers . Some residents still have no power. They say it’s from a weather phenomenon called El Niño…we have icicles dripping of the windows.
