The Birds in My Neighborhood: Sam

The last week or two I have been hanging out on my balcony for a little while almost every day. Mostly I will drink some tea and do a bit of stretching while I listen and watch the birds. I thought it might be fun to start posting about some of the birds I encounter.

This one is Sam the song sparrow (Melospiza melodia). He is a little shy, but most of the time I can see him hanging out on the ivy hedge bordering the yard next to ours. He is the only bird so far that I recognize as an individual (not that I could pick him out of a line up, but based on his consistent location and behavior). Fairly often he will get a bit sneaky and come over to the bird feeder in our yard. He likes to fly under the porch next to the feeder first, then hop out to where the food is.

Sam has been singing from his perch since before I started doing these sits. Recently I started to wonder if he would get a girlfriend soon. This morning when I started photographing him I noticed another song sparrow on the hedge a foot or two away. She would sit there quietly while Sam sang, or sometimes would hop down to feed on the ground while Sam perched on a shrub nearby.

It will be interesting to keep an eye on them as the season progresses.

Beach Pebbles

I don't tend to spend a lot of time look at pebbles. But these ones from up near Bellingham sure were pretty. I'm curious about all the different colors and textures. Most of the larger rocks I see are fairly uniform, why does this stretch of beach have such a high degree of variation?

Spring!

It has been a pretty warm winter here near the Puget Sound and from what I read, it will likely continue that way. Last week I picked my first batch of nettles (Urtica dioica), some of them were already nearly a foot tall. I have seen house flies buzzing around for the first time in what seems like a few months. Indian plum is well on its way to being leafed out. I'm not sure if it is related to spring or not (seems like it might be), but my cat caught and ate two mice (or at least that is how many he brought in to the house) after having had a pretty dry spell for the last couple of months.

It's an exciting time of year. I will be headed on a trip south for a couple of weeks and when I get back it will be time to start putting in some work on the garden!

Thanksgiving Walk

Thanksgiving vacation was spent on Whidbey island. The weather was lovely on Friday, so we went on a drive and ended up taking a walk on one of the beaches there (I think adjacent to Cultus bay). It was a protected little bay and there were large slow eddies out in the water; logs and other debris floating in lazy circuits.

There were several great blue herons out there. My favorite was the one hitching a ride on a log out in the bay.

There were also a lot of shore birds flocked up out at the point. Many of them were just standing there, but at the edges they seemed more active. I saw an individual of the smallest shore bird species hopping around on one-leg. I wondered how it managed to survive one-legged long enough to get good at it. After observing for awhile longer I noticed that there was more than one doing that, and then I saw one of them put down a second leg and pull the other up. I guess they don't mind hopping around on one leg while keeping the other warm.

Growth of a Fungus: a Puzzle

I went out to a friend's neighborhood to look around in the woods for signs of wildlife. The housing development is right next to large forested areas and there have been problems with bears raiding garbage so she is interested in helping her neighbors be more aware of the animals around them - hopefully with increased awareness will come increased responsibility.

While on our wander through the woods I noticed this bracket fungus with an alder stick going through it a little more than an inch in from the edge. The stick was detached from its tree, but was still fairly firm with much of its bark remaining. Fallen alder branches seem to rot fairly quickly in our wet northwest winters, so I suspect that this branch had fallen since last winter. It was quite firmly encompassed by the fungus though. I have never seen anything suggesting that a shelf fungus would grow so quickly to engulf the limb like that in less than a year. The only alternative that comes to mind (which also seems unlikely to me) is that the stick remained upright and in sturdy condition for the years it might take the fungus to grow that much.

Any ideas?