Favorite Bird Pics of February ’24

Pair of Wood Ducks checking out a potential nesting box

Brown-headed Nuthatch working on a new home

Great Blue Herons and Mallards Ducks–I think these mallards hired the herons as sentinels. The herons never moved the whole two hours I was there while the mallards slept or paddled around.

Hermit Thrush–I’ve seen and heard these birds quite a bit this winter. They will migrate north in the spring, so listen for them while you can.

Belted kingfisher (female)

Golden-crowned Kinglet–These little guys spend their summers nesting and breeding the high elevation spruce-fir forests of Appalachian North Carolina. They grace us here in the Piedmont with their presence during the winter months.

Red-shouldered Hawks–He brought her a snake but she didn’t seem interested.

Eastern Bluebird (male)

Pileated Woodpecker

Cedar Waxwing

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker

Red-headed Woodpecker

Pine Warbler

“Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Jesus; Matthew 6:26)

Birds in March ’23

Red-headed Woodpecker

Blue Jay

Canadian Goose sitting on her nest

Wood Duck

Northern Cardinal

Female Cardinal in Cherry Blossoms

Pair of Mallard Ducks

Pair of Red-Shouldered Hawks

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher

Cedar Waxwing

Great Egret

Season of Hummingbirds

My first full season of feeding and watching hummingbirds is coming to an end. I thought I would get tired of cleaning out feeders on a regular basis, but, no, all I did was add a couple of more feeders. I’m not enough of an expert to be able to give an accurate count, but I did have at least two adult males on a regular basis and probably a couple of females. In the middle of the season, several more hummingbirds began to come regularly. At least three of them are juvenile males making me assume the females had a successful season with hatching and bringing out their young. It will be interesting next year to see how many of these males show up to stake out their territory.

The tongue is out!

Any time I interact with nature–whether through observation or studying the life cycles of plants, birds, or animals–I am reminded anew of God’s majestic, artistic creation and His unmatched imagination in creating both the hummingbird and the woodpecker; the whale and the seal; the butterfly and the daylily.

“Some people, in order to find God, will read a book. But there is a great book, the book of created nature. Look carefully at it top and bottom, observe it, read it. God did not make letters of ink for you to recognize him in; he set before your eyes all these things he has made. Why look for a louder voice?” Augustine of Hippo