To be clear, it’s an old picture of a hawk, not a picture of an old hawk.
This was up at the top of Mt. San Jacinto outside of Palm Springs in the summer of 2021. I saw this gorgeous red-tailed hawk, but he obviously wasn’t thrilled with hikers or tourists and wouldn’t let me get too close.
I also love all of the structure and detail in this old fallen tree trunk.
I don’t know what Mr. Hawk is staring at so intently, but I’m betting it ended up being lunch!
Filed under Birds, Photography, Travel
I was out and about for the Sunday morning shopping when these guys asked if I had any spare trash.
These two were near my car when I got out. There were four more picking over what had fallen out of a trash receptacle or been left on the ground in the parking lot. They were LARGE birds.
These two were strutting around like they were line dancing and you can see that they were displaying the ruff of feathers under their chin. I’m no expert, but I’m thinking it was a mating display of some sort.
Given their size, the chin ruff, and those honkin’ huge beaks, these have to be ravens. I see a pair up in the trees behind our house, but they rarely come down to the ground, so I don’t always remember just how big they are.
Lovely birds! Beautiful! I think they’re spectacular.
Just don’t piss them off. They can recoginze and remember individual humans, they’re very intelligent (they can use tools, i.e., sticks to get bugs out from holes, problem solve like dropping stones into a vase to raise the water level to where they can drink, etc), they carry a grudge, and there’s some evidence that they can even pass that information on to others in their flock.
Hitchcock knew what he was talking about.
Filed under Birds, Critters, Photography
Welcome, December! Let’s see if we can make this the festive, joyous month that Hollywoood would have us believe it is. I’m feeling good about the possibilities.
A couple of things have happened with local neighborhood critters. I find them odd and amusing.
First, the skunk.
I haven’t seen it, but several times this month I’ve definitely smelled it. It seems to be lurking in or around our yard, possibly in a pile of construction equipment and materials that our landlord (a general contractor) has left there. Earlier today, when the gardeners were cleaning up over there, they seemed to have disturbed it.
Or it could be in the garage. When I was putting up the first batch of Christmas lights last week I moved some boxes and both heard something moving under the workbench and got a strong whiff of skunk scent. It didn’t spray, but I knew it was there.
Or both.
For now, I’m leaving it alone at all costs and double checking when I go out at night to make sure that I’m not surprising it accidentally. Live and let live. And hope that it moves on to bother someone else.
Somewhat more bizarre for me is the rooster.
I never thought of it being “normal” for there to be “backyard chickens” in suburban Los Angeles, but it actually isn’t that unusual. They’re not permitted in apartments and there are some pretty lenient regulations on the number you can have and how big your yard has to be to have them, but the bar’s set really low. It’s surprising how many upper class and upper middle class neighborhoods have chickens as residents.
Most folks have only one rooster. I’m not sure if that’s a regulation or just that roosters tend to fight if there are more than one. I’m no “chicken dude” by any definition of the term.
Sometime over the summer, one of the houses below us in the canyon got a handful of chickens and the obligatory one rooster. I usually hear it in the morning if I go outside in the back.
But tonight, at 22:45, going outside to walk around and earn my blue “stand” dot on my watch’s exercise app (I’m apparently strongly motivated by stickers, dots, badges, gold stars, atta-boys, and so on) I can hear this idiot rooster going off about every minute. It’s coming up on midnight. It’s pitch dark. We’re eight hours away from morning twilight starts and over nine hours before actual sunrise.
Why is this idiot rooster crowing like his life depends on it?
It’s LA. I can only assume that the rooster is neurotic, like everyone and everything else here. It must be something in the air, or in the water. No doubt they’ll be getting some rooster therapy soon … if they haven’t already.
Oh, and the juncos have returned. We had the two that stayed here year around, but sometime in the last month about a dozen more showed up. Between them, the 18 to 24 mourning doves, and the house finches, morning feeding time gets crowded.
Where’s Merlin Parkins (and his large, macho man sidekick, Jim) when you need them?
While there was writing done, it was only a couple hundred words, so I’ll just include it with tomorrow’s post…
Never mind! Belay my last!
I will post it. It’s important to show that this marathon is accomplished with the days where I write 2,000 words and the ones when I write 200 words.
…and now I’m writing the things in THIS post that need to go in THAT post…
Focus. I hear it’s a wonderful thing to have.
Meanwhile, with our first big storm coming in (yeah! need the rain!) I went out to turn off the sprinklers for the next week and was standing next to all of the flowering plants that grow up through the chainlink fence between the yards. They’re COVERED in bees, who are totally harmless as long as you leave them alone (gee, mom was right!). You can also hear, in the background, the two ravens that hang out in our yard, clacking and chatting with one another.
We live at the top of a hill. A big hill. A really steep hill. This is one of the key reasons that we have, in five or six Halloweens here, gotten maybe one or two trick-or-treaters, TOTAL.
It’s sad. At the old house on Pomelo we were on flat ground, near the local elementary school, and we would take out the telescopes in the front yard when possible and let folks look at whatever was up while we handed out candy. We got hundreds of trick-or-treaters every year. If it were cloudy and we didn’t have the telescopes out we would have people all night asking where they were.
Here? This year, as busy as I am, I didn’t even have the time or effort to put out a single Halloween decoration. Nor did a single house anywhere climbing up the hill. Plenty of lights and inflatables and gigantic spiders and 12′ skeletons and some really nice displays down on the flat streets at the bottom of the hill. But get up past the first two or three houses? Nada. Zip. Zero. Zilch.
Except for the owls. They were in the spirit of the holiday! Two of them, right across the street, with a third way off in the distance down the canyon.
Being NaNoWriMo Eve, the other question is whether or not I’m going to be stupid enough to try it again. As mentioned, I’m busier than dog, and while I’m finally at a point where I can see the light at the end of the tunnel (I think, could be an oncoming train) on a couple of major projects that I’ve been working on for months, there are others that are just starting up.
Curiously, I’ve seen this diagram popping up from a couple of different folks on social media in the last week:
(No idea who created this.)
I see nothing inaccurate about this. It would be wise to pay attention.
So, of course, there’s about a 90% chance that I’ll at least start a NaNoWriMo project tomorrow. My odds of completing it are about the same as the odds of winning the lottery. But I can’t do it if I don’t get started, so I’ll probably get started.
May the odds be always in my favor?
The Santa Ana winds are blowing – we’ve had gusts pushing 40 mph here for about the last 24 hours and in the next 24 hours there’s a possibility we’ll get them up to 50 or even 60 mph. The BBQ and some backyard chairs and empty trash cans have been repeatedly scattered, retrieved, and scattered again. As long as they don’t end up vanishing from the yard and disappearing toward Malibu, I’m just going to leave them for now and worry about it later in the week.
I went outside to take a thirty-second video, which turned out much longer when I got a visitor. I completely didn’t realize that I was standing directly underneath Little Bastard’s hummingbird feeder…
The perspective on the iPhone video is deceptive, in part because I started holding it down around waist height. The bottom of the feeder is only about an inch above my head, and when the hummingbird is flying the buzzing sound is LOUD. You can hear it a little bit in the video, but in real life it sounds like the biggest bee or wasp you’ve ever imagined is two inches from your ear.
I expected him to fly away as soon as I started moving my arm with the camera (sloooooowly…) and at least three times he does fly away, but only a couple feet, then he comes back. Once he finally flew away at the end and I stopped recording and left, he was back at the feeder in just a few seconds. I’m guessing that with the very, very low humidity, the wind, and all of the work he was doing flying around in the wind, he was really, REALLY hungry and taking a chance on me being a danger was a chance he had to take. Again – a guess.
Not common, but a return visitor. I spotted this guest last January, and I’ve heard it a couple of times in the last week. The Northern Flicker is back!
See it? Neither did I. But what I heard was a tapping or knocking sound directly overhead. I thought it might be one of the downy woodpeckers we see here every once in a while, but nope! Just above center, on a bare branch, is a much larger bird.
The yellowish belly with all of those spots! That black, crescent-shaped arc under its chin! It’s our red-shafted Northern Flicker, back for a refill of SoCal bugs, and I have just the dead branches for it!
Is this the exact same bird as was here in January? I don’t know. Maybe? Probably? We have other migratory birds (the juncos, some of the hummingbirds, the yellow-headed blackbird) that seem to be the same ones coming back year after year, but as I’ve noted before, I can’t get any of them to wear nametags or sign in on the guest register, so it’s a guessing game.
I unfortunately didn’t have my “good” camera (the DSLR with the telephoto lens) with me, just my cell phone. As has been said, the best camera is the one you have with you.
Look at that beak! It makes it obvious that it’s a large member of the woodpecker family, doesn’t it?
I’ll try to remember to carry my DSLR when I go out, just in case, and I’ll keep and eye out for the chance to get some better pictures.
Filed under Birds, Photography
The back yard grass has taken a real beating with the three years of drought and last year’s watering prohibitions.
But the mourning doves love it for a couple of reasons. First, it makes it easier to find the seed that gets thrown out every morning.
Second, the natural camoflouge works GREAT against the brown dirt and dead grass. On a nice lawn they stand out like a sore thumb.
Our current mourning dove flock is at about 15 to 20 most mornings. I’m assuming some of them are from the front porch nest earlier in the year, but they don’t wear name tags.
Still love those pink feet!
Filed under Birds, Photography
We’ve seen these dudes (or their relatives) in the past once or twice, but they’re not regulars.
Maybe it’s the grapes that brought them out. Putting a handful out is an experiment and they all disappeared in a day, so they were popular!
The “zebra-stripes” on the head make these guys stand out.
There were two or three flitting in, grabbing a seed or a chunk of grape, and flitting out.
They were fighting the mourning doves for the seeds. They may have been out of their weight class, but they were holding their own.
The Merlin app tells me that there are two similar species in our area. I’ve seen a Golden-crowned Sparrow once or twice, but never when I had a camera with me. They’re similar, but they just have one stripe on their head and it’s bright yellow.
The other is the Lark Sparrow, which has stripes on its head that’s more dark brown and white, and they go all the way around the head and down onto the throat, seven or eight stripes instead of three.
They’re very similar in size and coloration to the house finches. Any given morning we’ll have a couple dozen or more house finches out there when the seed gets scattered, so except for the head markings these guys fit right in.
A decent picture of the markings on the wing and back feathers.
This one finally marched up to the edge of the porch and started barking at me. I think the gist of it was, “We want more grapes! Where’s the good stuff, the fresh ones?”
Filed under Birds, Critters, Photography
There was a truly spectacular ISS pass tonight, the station rising in the northwest just as it got truly dark and sailing about 80%+ across the sky before fading into darkness in the west. It was amazingly bright, something like Magnitude -3.9. I noticed the time just a minute before it was set to rise, so I didn’t have time to grab my camera and tripod and gear and get it set up in time. So I went out into the front yard and simply watched. It was wonderful.
The red-shouldered hawks were at it again, something like the 7th or 8th day in a row that they’ve been in the pine trees below us on the hill. I wonder if they might be building a nest nearby. For much of the time they were being raucous outside I was on a Zoom meeting and couldn’t go out to take pictures, but I listened to them from inside. They were loud enough so that the rest of the staff could have heard them if I hadn’t been on mute. I enjoyed listening to them, even if I didn’t see them or get any pictures.
I saw several lizards in the back yard, but never when I had my camera with me. I had my phone, but they weren’t that close, so I just let it go. We had a nice conversation about how warm it was getting again, nearly 90ºF today and getting even warmer for the week ahead. They enjoyed that news quite a bit, but I had to remind them to watch out for the birds. I’m not sure the hawks would bother with something as small as them, but the scrub jays and mockingbirds most certainly would.
The hummingbirds were out, starting to complain that the feeders are getting low. I was too busy today to clean and refill them, but I promised to look at it tomorrow. They’re fine for today, but they do get nervous. No pictures were taken.
The rose bush that had given me the one fantastic pink and white bloom a few weeks ago has decided to cough up a handful more. For some reason when I went out to get the mail I didn’t have my phone with me to take pictures. Huh! That almost never happens. But it did today. The blooms will wait for their closeups another day.
I happened to be out just before 17:00 when I caught the UPS 757 banked over right over our house to turn to final approach for Burbank Runway 08. It’s a regular flight, but sometimes they turn inside of us to the east, sometimes swing in more from the Porter Ranch area. It’s a honkin’ big plane (that’s an official aviation term) and when they cross overhead they’re just extending their flaps so it looks even honkin’er bigger. I just watched, enjoyed the way it floated through the air, listened as those two big engines spooled down as the power was pulled back.
All of these things happened without any photos to share or other proof that I experienced them. I simply experienced them and held onto the memories.
Which brings me to one of the two or three best scenes ever filmed:
Today, no rain. There might still be tears.
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We Love The Stars Too Fondly 