Holiday Cold Blogging

by CKR

My outdoor thermometer read three degrees this morning before sunrise. Then the wind came up. I’m not even thinking about scraping the inch of snow that fell last night off my stairs and driveway. Fortunately, the wind is helping to clear it. The temperature is going up fairly quickly; it’s twenty degrees at about noon, and tomorrow is supposed to be warmer.

One day last week, the birds snarfed down an entire brick of suet in a single day, so I figured that the cold weather meant I would need more suet. I loaded two bricks into the net feeder before the worst of the storm hit, and this morning I put hot water in the birdbath.

For me, I made bread yesterday and soup today. I also got out the underwear I bought at Stockmann’s in Tallinn on the way to Moscow one December.

I thought I was seeing at least one female Cassin’s finch (Carpodacus cassinii, first photo above), and yesterday I saw the male, too. The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology has a nice page on how to distinguish house, purple and Cassin’s finches, which are fairly similar. I find that the most distinctive markings are the female’s darkly striped face and the male’s relative unstriped breast.

There was a western bluebird, (Sialia mexicana) too, just for a short time, gone when I returned with the camera. Probably drawn to the suet, so I’ll keep alert.

No roadrunner lately. I’ve got a dish of insect-flavored suet pellets (yum!) out for her. Something eats the pellets from time to time, but I haven’t seen it. She showed up first on Christmas last year, but it was much snowier then.

And then there’s the stickler for accuracy. It’s a bird feeder, right? So this sharp-shinned hawk, Accipiter striatus (or maybe a Cooper’s hawk, Accipiter cooperii) says he’s a bird, and the feeder has some of his favorite food: juncos, bushtits, house finches….Yeah, after reading this, I think it’s a sharp-shinned hawk.