Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by spiffing up our place, so we can sell this dwelling and leave a cold and forbidding land. Since winter is here to stay and we’ve been below zero for almost a week, it has been game on to take care of things up here and move back to our other home, Kansas. Sure, we just got here, relatively speaking, why would we want to go back to where you just moved from, relatively speaking? Well, its not all that complicated, really. Where we used to live, the temperature can be 60 degrees in late December. That and our Son and Grandson live there, so, we spruce up the house, and head back South.
When we are not painting, or wondering when we will ever have a shower again, long story, I like to take pictures of birds and weather phenomena. You’ll notice the image at the top of this post is from yesterday, 10 below with a howling wind and the sun with a couple of sun dogs. I don’t think I ever witnessed sun dogs in South Kansas.
We gave up feeding seed because it just contributed to about 50 Sparrows freeloading on our seed and getting obese. We also had an issue with Starlings on exposed suet, so I made a little roof to go over the suet and now only woodpecker types get to dine on suet, rather than on our house, which is nice.
Clicking on any of the images will make them full sized.
From left to right, we have a Red-Breasted Nuthatch, a Red-Bellied woodpecker, the same Red-Bellied woodpecker with a female Downy woodpecker wishing the Red Belly would hurry up and get out of the way. The last picture is a male Hairy woodpecker. The look the same as the Downey’s, but are much bigger.
This is a Chickadee and you can tell it is cold by how he is hanging by one leg and warming up the other. It was around -7 below and a 20 mph wind.
This video is of the 2 Nuthatches’ we have coming to our suet feeder. The fist one is a Red-Breasted Nuthatch and the second is a White-Breasted Nuthatch.
Yesterday, I noticed a squirrel doing something odd. I grabbed my camera, and caught him popping his head out of the snow and then going back under, looking for a black walnut he had buried.
I switched over to video and it has this neat option of changing over to “shaky cam” without you having to do anything more than try to stand still. For me, that ship has long since sailed out of port. He found the nut and headed back to his place to eat. I asked my video editing software to smooth out my shaky hands and it laughed at me.
You get a brief glimpse of a Dark-Eyed Junco on the Squirrel baffle. They are normally ground feeders, but since it got cold, they have moved up to eat bits of suet that gets dropped from the woodpecker jack hammering on the frozen suet.
Today is Christmas Eve and I encourage you to find a church that preaches from God’s holy word given unto us and has not opened its door to the world. Celebrate the birth of our Lord, Savior and King.
Isaiah 9:6
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.