Category: Ferd’s Birds

Pretty good backyard birding yesterday!

It was a good morning yesterday. We had just arrived the night before from our trip to AZ and I was feeling a little jet lagged. I took my Land O’ Lakes hot chocolate, a magazine, and my camera to the porch and just hung out for an hour. Lots of little visitors came and went. I got some nice shots of some of our frequent flyers. Do you have a favorite? 🙂

Birding at Tanglewood Park

Gail had the good fortune of seeing a Barred Owl while birding with our local Audubon club at Tanglewood Park last week. So today she took me to the same spot to see if I could see the owl, too. We weren’t so lucky this time. The best bird I saw was Princess GailBirdtale herself!

But we did see a few others that I don’t see every day. A group of Cedar Waxwings flew in to feast on berries. (It’s a bit overexposed, but it’s the only way to get at least some detail of small subjects against a bright sky.)

A pair of male Red-winged Blackbirds were just hanging out:

Here are two shots of a Yellow-rumped Warbler, just because I love all the warblers and their songs.

We also saw a Great Blue Heron flying by, a bunch of our state bird Cardinals, a Carolina Chickadee, Mallard Ducks and Blue-winged Teal, Downy Woodpeckers and a Red-bellied Woodpecker, a Mourning Dove, a Blue Jay, an Eastern Bluebird, American Goldfinches, and best of all, a Belted Kingfisher. It was an excellent three hour walk!

I’ll have to come back to catch a glimpse of that Barred Owl!

Pee Dee National Wildlife Refuge

Gail and I went on a field trip today with our Winston-Salem Audubon birding group. We all drove about two hours south to the Pee Dee National Wildlife Refuge. It’s about two months too early to see the beautiful springtime migrants, but we did get a good look at a lot of water fowl. Here are a few pix I took of Hooded Merganser, the first is a female and the others male.

Salem Lake birding

We had a very nice weather day yesterday, so Princess Gail and I went out with our local birding group to Salem Lake. We had a pretty good couple of hours. We spotted American Goldfinch, Canada Goose, Dark-eyed Junco, Downy Woodpecker, Eastern Phoebe, Golden-crowned Kinglet, Great Blue Heron, Pied-billed Grebe, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, Ruddy Duck, Tufted Titmouse, Turkey Vulture, and Yellow-rumped Warbler. Here are a couple of the better shots of the day. The always cool Downy Woodpecker:

And a couple of shots of the Golden-crowned Kinglet: