Another Hawk

One of my weekend morning rituals is to sit in my study, sip coffee and read. I am not reading a newspaper (it has been years since I subscribed to one of those), but instead various things on the Internet. This morning, for example, I was researching Puerto Rico bird watching.

My study has a couple of windows that look out on my backyard. It is fairly common for me to see movement out of the corner of my eye as I sit reading at my computer. This is usually the squirrels chasing each other or some variety of songbird visiting my bird feeders. This morning, however, it was a bit different. I saw something larger fly by.

When I stopped reading to peer out the window, I saw a rather large bird perched on my fence. It was a hawk. I immediately ran to my kitchen to fetch my binoculars. When I got back, he was still there and one look told me it was not the Red-shouldered Hawk I took pictures of a couple weeks back. I had an idea of what it was, but was not sure. Instead of looking more to get the identification correct, I ran back to the kitchen to get my camera.

The camera already had the big lens on it, so I was ready to go. I pulled up the window blinds and then aimed the camera...nothing happened. Huh? Oh yeah...the memory card was on my desk. I quickly popped that into the camera and then realized that the camera's battery was dead. Sheesh. I had another on standby, so I fished that out and replaced the battery.

I was happy to see that the bird was still perched on the fence. I took a few pictures through the window, but this window was very dirty, and had a screen in it. I had pictures, but they were quite lame (so lame, they are not even posted on Flickr). So I moved one window to the right and was pleased that I still had a view of the bird. And this window did not have a screen in it (yes...my "to do" list at home is pretty long).

I managed to get a small number of reasonable pictures through the second window of my study. Here is one of them. The bird is an immature Cooper's Hawk. If you click through that link and read the description of a Cooper's Hawk, you will see "A medium-sized hawk of the forest, the Cooper's Hawk specializes in eating birds." My bird feeders might be attracting more than hungry song birds. Here is a link to another picture of a Cooper's Hawk that I found on the web that shows the tail from the back.

I think I said it was cold

A few posts back, when I described the trip to Chincoteague, I think I said it was cold. If I didn't, then let me correct that misunderstanding. It was cold. And when the wind blew, it was a type of cold that requires the use of profanity to describe. Here are a few miscellaneous photos that include ice, just as a guide of the coldness of it all.

The first picture is of a piece of wood or stump that was sticking up out of the water. The wind was blowing hard enough to send a sheet of ice from one end of the pond to the other. When the ice encountered the piece of wood, the ice was thin enough for the wood to carve right through it, leaving that trail of broken ice to the right of the stump.



This picture shows a group of Tundra Swan trying to get to the other side of a sheet of ice. One of the group just took flight and flew over. These, however, decided it would be easier to climb up and walk over the ice.



Finally, here is a shot of what I presume to be a very cold Great Blue Heron. To be more precise: I do not presume that this is a Great Blue Heron, but I do presume he is cold. He is standing up to his feathers in water, right next to a section that is frozen on top. It is almost like a Great Blue Heron Popsicle.