Titmouse Crash and Crocus

Beautiful sunny day here expected to reach 43 degrees today! After my post yesterday a Tufted Titmouse crashed into the big window, then landed on one of the iron chairs on the porch. Valentine the cat woke from her sleep inside and knew what had happened. In minutes she was out there, I went out and chased her away. The titmouse stayed put so I grabbed the little camera and took a few close ups from an inch away. After I took maybe 10 photos I coaxed her into flying to a safer place.

 Here is the Tufted Titmouse perched on the chair, notice the tail is turned down. Never seen a tail turned down like this on bird, must have been hurting pretty bad!

 Such a cute little bird. The feather details really came out good with my G11 camera, I hear there is now a G12. I purchased the G11 just after it came out, so far I have taken almost 5500 photos with it.

No fear here....

 Carolina Wren on the oak tree. These guys are very curious, yet for some reason they are one of the hardest birds to photograph.  They visit the compost bin much more often that the feeders.

Red-bellied Woodpecker, you can see the long claws very well here. I took this photo through the window without flash as the flash bounces back on the glass. This was a full f stop under exposed so I adjusted it in raw format using Photoshop CS5.

 I bet most of you that feed the birds get tired of squirrels raiding the feeders. I do as well, but when you capture a few photos like these one might think it is worth it to have them around.

These were taken by poking my camera out the screen door of the porch.

While spreading mulch yesterday I found this under some leaves. I looked it up from last year it is Crocus ancyrensis "Golden Bunch" For those of you that are new to the blog this crocus was on this post.

FYI the mulch yesterday ended up being 35 or 36 large wheelbarrows full. If I calculated correctly that comes out to 60 cents a wheelbarrow load. I spread it in more paths that any previous loads we have received.

3 birds crash into the window at a time!

This morning as I was getting ready to go out the door and three quick window crashes happened all at once. I was in disbelief that three birds banged into the window, it is a big window but three birds? Has this ever happened at your house? Well anyway I went outside to find three female Purple Finches, two were on the floor of the deck and another perched on some welded wire fencing Meg uses to block the dogs from chasing a car or truck that might go by.

 This female Purple Finch might have hit the glass door and not the big window. It was the first to fly away unharmed after about 10 minutes hanging on to the fencing.

 No the decking is not that dirty, that is tiny ice crystals, I was worried this finch was going to freeze to the decking. Yet he flew away unharmed after maybe 15 minutes.

That is not a very happy look is it? Finally after 20 minutes this female Purple Finch flew away.
So with a short delay I went off to do my job for the day and didn't have to figure out what to do with these stunned birds.

The worst bird crash I ever had here was an adult Red-tailed Hawk that flew into the patio door glass and was dead in one of the patio chairs that was against the door glass. It was on Martin Luther King's birthday