Happy Memorial Day

Hope everyone had a nice Memorial Weekend.

Ours was quiet, the weather was nice for us just to sit outside and enjoy.

We are still working on the walls of our house, getting close to finishing.

We found some Giant Swallowtail babies on our Rue in the garden, we will watch their growth if the birds don't find them. I need to get some zinnias started for when they are butterflies.

It looks like summer has finally arrived!!

Spring house work

We been working hard this week, Ken is doing some drywall repair in the living room and I have been doing spring cleaning. I've done the basement, garage and my art room so far.

It's been a cool drizzling week so I decided to bring in my Iris, especially the ones that smell like grape soda that way I can enjoy them.

We have taken some time to do a little birding between rain drops and cleaning.

We spotted a mother Louisiana Waterthrush feeding her babies at East Valley Park. We also spotted two Summer Tanagers in the park.

I finished reading this book about Phoebe Snetsinger who became obsessed with birdwatching in the 70's and at her death in 1999 she had a bird life list of 8,368. She spent most of each year traveling the world looking for birds, there are about 9700 birds in the world so she came close to seeing them all.

Well I don't think I'll get that obsessed with birding but I like her quote " One of the wonderful aspects of birding is that it is endless. There's always some new place to go, some exciting new thing to find."

Til next week, have a good one.

Biggest Week

We are back from our birding trip to the Biggest Week in American Birding.

We drove over 700 miles to Port Clinton, OH to see one of the hottest spots in the Western Hemisphere for warbler watching on their spring migration.

Magee Marsh has a mile of boardwalk and the birds are just fluttering among the trees and the ground litter feeding getting ready for their trip across Lake Erie to their northern breeding grounds.

(Remember you can click on the photo to enlarge it.)

The weather for the 4 days turned out to be great, we were afraid of bad weather since the forecast was for storms. We did have a couple of evening rains and drove home in rain.

We met our OH friends, Joyce and Dave whom we met in TX and did the Santa Ana Hawk Watch with, on Thursday afternoon.
We spotted 108 species over the 4 days, 27 warblers and 12 new species to add to our life list.
They are Whip-poor-will, Willow Flycatcher, Philadelphia Vireo, Veery, Bobolink, American Woodcock, Golden Wing Warbler, Black-throated Blue Warbler, Bay-breasted Warbler, Connecticut Warbler, Mourning Warbler and Canada Warbler.
At times, it seemed that there were more bird watchers and photographers then birds.
This was the 2nd year of the event even though birders have been coming to the marsh for years to watch the spring migration.



This is my typical shot of the birds, so I have deleted alot photos. The birds move around fast and I have not learned how to catch them. Ken is much better.

Can you find the bird? It's a Black throated Blue Warbler. I think I should have rotated the photo.

The Yellow Warblers will stay and nest here, like this one.

Can you find the Palm Warbler?

Saturday was International Migratory Bird Day so there were additional activities such as a raptor exhibit, a big sit fundraiser for Magee, family activities, book signings and song bird banding demos all to educate and get more people aware of the declining numbers of song birds because of loss of habitat.

We met Kenn Haufman who has written several guide books and his wife is the Exec. Director of Black Swamp Bird Observatory a part of Magee Marsh.

We did take a little time to sight see as we wanted to photograph Marblehead Lighthouse.

We also enjoy finding more than birds to photograph!

There are more birding places in the area that we didn't take time to visit, guess we'll have to go back and take the RV and stay longer.

So many places and so many birds!!

Enjoying Spring

It's been a beautiful week, one day of spring rain.

I've been doing a little straightening up of the house, RV and cleaned up the flower gardens. We go to East Valley Park almost everyday to do a little bird watching.
So far we have a count of 40 bird species for East Valley, we have seen a Black throated Warbler, Yellow Warbler, Wilson Warbler and a couple of different flycatchers and yes this Rose-breasted Grosbeak and a Summer Tanager.

We had a good birding day last Saturday with the Backyard Bird shop group at Squaw Creek NWR. We had a count of 82 species with five new species to us. It's a great place to visit, right now the shore birds are stopping for a rest on their migration north as well as several warblers.

The resident birds are busy building nests and some like the Barred Owl have babies already.

There was a report of a rare duck but our group didn't spot it.

We'd like to wish all the Mother's a great Mother's Day.