Find The Hummer

There was a lot of bird activity going on today. Aside from the usual two dozen plus mourning doves looking for their daily handout and Little Bastard doing his finest whistling dive bomber routine to impress the ladies and the batches of house finches looking for a good place to make a nest under the porch eaves. Those are all just things that happen on days that end in “y.”

Early in the day I could hear red-tailed hawks (the sound that they use for “eagles” in all of the Westerns made since the invention of the talkies) but couldn’t see them. Then I spotted a couple of ravens circling above the neighbors’ houses, over the canyon down below. A few seconds later two red-tailed hawks burst up out of the canyon, screaming, followed by four other ravens with the two up high diving to join the attack. It’s like a biker gang fight in the sky.

I caught a big scrub jay trying to empty out the hummingbird feeder. I opened the door to the back yard and scared him off once, but at lunch time I noticed that the feeder which had a week’s worth of hummingbird food at breakfast was now empty, so I’m thinking I wasn’t too intimidating in the long run. (Story of my life…)

It was somewhat sunny and warm, which will be ending tomorrow as we get ready for another week or more of heavy rain, so I went out this afternoon and saw some fantastic clouds, contrails, and a bit of iridescence as the Sun shown through a high layer of clouds.

I also noticed in a second picture (below) that Little Bastard was keeping an eye on me. Or waiting for that scrub jay to come back. Could go either way.

Can you spot him?

He’s not very big.

But he’s loud.

Here he was perched.

When he’s flying around you can hear him from fifty feet away.

And when he’s doing that whistling dive bomber mating thing you can hear him from a lot further away than that.

Click on the picture.

Blow it up to full sized on your screen.

Where would you be hiding if you were a hummgbird, particularly a really territorial one that needed to survey your domain?

Ah, of course.

There he is.

Stay dry this weekend.

Don’t pick any fights with birds ten times your size.

Let the wookie scrub jay win!

I’ll refill the feeder.