Birdfeeding

[ysabetwordsmith]

Today is cloudy, cool, and wet. It rained last night so the ground is still soaked.

I fed the birds. I've seen a flock of sparrows, two mourning doves, and a pair of house finches. :D I am so happy that the house finch I saw yesterday seems to have a mate.

While outside, I also flushed a medium-sized long-billed bird. While I didn't get a close look at it, I suspect it to be a woodcock. Upon looking them up, I discovered that they are common migrants through Illinois, though uncommon in winter or summer, and they like wet habitat such as swamps or wet woodlands. We live on reclaimed (and regularly disputed by nature) prairie marsh and several miles away is a wildlife refuge adjacent to a lake with rivers and creeks running through it. Lovely stopover if you are a wetland bird.

One of the quirks of my brain is that I have hunter-sight, which is attracted by motion and excels at breaking camouflage. Sometimes I will catch the merest glimpse of a critter, often a bird, and my brain will instantly spit out an ID like that. It also happened with a dark-blue streak in a pine forest out west: Stellar's jay. This is what happens when you consume whole wildlife guides and have a hyperactive extrapolative engine in your head. It keeps going, "Look! A bird!"

Exciting indoor news: weeks ago I planted a packet of random succulent seeds. I spotted the first sprout yesterday -- a tiny spiky thing with a couple of millimeter-sized leaves. It is only visible because it is green against a dark brown background. <3

Comments

[pameladean]

I think my partner and I once encountered somebody else with that ability while out hiking. He saw our binoculars, asked what birds we'd seen, and evidently decided that we needed some help. He would just glance at a half-leafed-out tree and say, "Olive-sided flycatcher" or "Palm warbler" and half the time we couldn't see the bird at all until it flew away.

P.

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I'm probably not that good. I've seen people do it with butterflies though, that was fun.

[redbird]

I went for a walk today, and heard some birds calling that I'm pretty sure weren't here during the winter, but I didn't see them, and can't usually distinguish birds by their calls.


But it was a nice walk, and I saw spring flowers: crocuses, which I was expecting, and one early daffodil, which I photographed so I could send it to cattitude, who had said a little earlier that it was too soon for daffodils.

[julian]

Oh, neat!

(I've heard a woodcock displaying (peent, peeeent), but not yet seen one.)

Re: Well ...

[pameladean]

Wow, butterflies are harder, I'd think.

The person we met had been sun avid birder for years, and I'm sure the practice enhanced his natural abilities.

Re: Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>Wow, butterflies are harder, I'd think.<<

Yeah, they were distinguishing things that looked the same to me -- at some distance.

>>The person we met had been sun avid birder for years, and I'm sure the practice enhanced his natural abilities.<<

Likely so. I mean, I had to load the database in order to do what I do. I still tend to get sucked into things. Today it was moss, because I'd been writing about a character with Moss Powers, I went outside and all my mosses snagged my attention. I must've blown most of an hour researching earlier because I kept getting interested in the articles about mosses, although those were for California redwood territory.

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

So far I have basic yellow trumpets and ice follies blooming. The fancy ones bloom later.

Re: Well ...

[pameladean]

"Yeah, they were distinguishing things that looked the same to me -- at some distance."

That's so amazing.

"I must've blown most of an hour researching earlier because I kept getting interested in the articles about mosses, although those were for California redwood territory."

I do that too! It can be distracting, and I guess occasionally get one into trouble, but on the whole seems like a nice kind of brain to have. At least, I find my sudden obsessions with things not directly relevant to my life or plans to be very pleasant much of the time.

P.

Re: Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I certainly wouldn't trade the way my mind works for any other. I may be bad at some things that most humans seem good at, but I can also do many things that they can't. I like being a repository of knowledge. I like being able to hack languages I don't even speak.