A wet day but the birds are still out and about.
Calisthenics!
Bad hair day. It happens.
A lot of "crest down" today. I'm not convinced by the web pages that say "crest up = aggression" and "crest down = relaxed". Based on what I've seen there is no rhyme nor reason. There's a lot of "birds and bees" happening: some mourning doves exchanging food, a starling courtship display, a pair of cardinals flitting through the trees. Maybe related to the crest down?
Practically no birds around today. I only saw a song sparrow and this cardinal, who was eying me suspiciously as I moved about trying to get rid of the branch sticking out of her head.
This girl was really hamming it up for the camera. One shot she looks like a parrot. And she sings, too!
Caught mid-song with his neck stretched out. A bright red bird at eye-level against a snowy background singing at the top of his lungs. If he can survive this he must be fit!
Another cold and wintery day, but lots of cardinals passing through. This one is on a neighbour's tree.
Lunch time!
Are pansies food for cardinals? Apparently not since he flitted away after a brief investigation.
Up in the treetops singing his song, as were all the other cardinals I saw today.
A cardinal chorus this morning after the ice storm of yesterday.
An even duller grayer drizzlier day with only one cardinal. (There is an ice storm in fact.)
A very quiet morning at the pond, but I did get a couple of backyard visitors, including this one. It was another gray day, again too dark for my camera. It's a good thing I'm not showing her full size!
A gray, dull drizzly day, but this guy was perky, sitting in the tree and chirping. It's lower pitched than the usual contact "chit", but seems to be used the same way: "I've arrived. Where is everybody?" accompanied by lots of looking around.
She's sitting on the branch in a half crouch with her wings spread. She reminds me of a chicken waiting for a rooster. A quick search showed a video of a male courtship ritual (think fan dancing) and another showed the male fetching a seed for the female (apparently they bring a lot of food to the chicks when they've hatched) but I couldn't find anything about crouching specific to cardinals. There were no other courtship displays out the window today, so maybe it's something else.
With temperatures below freezing (-4 C), cardinals were hiding this morning, though there were plenty of other birds about. It warmed up later and this guy stopped for a brief visit on the maple.
Waiting out the snow with friends.
We visited Brookside gardens today to see what flowers are out (5 or 6), and lo and behold, a bright red cardinal sitting in a tree. After a bunch of photos trying to get the right angle, I finally saw this girl, even though she was sitting there the whole time! The guys get all the attention.
Eyeing a potential morsel. It can't be anything good; it's way up in a maple tree, so some other bird must have "deposited" it there. He decided to eat it anyway. Ew!
A flash mob in the garden this morning, organized via twitter. Robins, chickadees, goldfinches, house finches, blue jays, doves, cardinals, starlings, cedar waxwings, a downy woodpecker, a northern flicker, and a red-bellied woodpecker keeping the beat on the eaves.
The cardinals are back at the pond! At least five today. Some of them seemed to be squabbling; I guess that means winter is coming to an end.
Where do all the cardinals go when the weather turns to rain and snow? There's a dozen about when the sun is out, but can I find one this morning? No! So again with the feeder, feeling a bit like a cheater, 'cuz finding them in the wild is much too slow.
The birds were hiding this morning: a bit of freezing rain seems to have kept them away. Without a neighbour's feeder there would be no cardinal today.
