Birds in April

I keep my camera on my desk beside me and when I spot an interesting view and have the time, I’ll try to capture it. I love the Flickers. They are large birds, the size of a crow, and covered in a bright pattern. We don’t see them often here, which makes it more exciting to capture one digitally.

I assume the debris on her beak is simply bits of earth stuck to her as she roots around for treats to eat.

The most frequent visitor I have here in the office is my omnipresent Douglas squirrel friend, Boh. She got very very fat for a time, and now she has thinned down, so I assume she has had her babies. I feel sorry for her, raising babies, and understand why she’s hungry.

Usually I am trying to fight off her attention in my office. And Pedro tries to fight off her attention at the house. She runs back and forth, playing off our soft hearts, and eats till she’s fit to burst. There is one Douglas squirrel male, smaller and thinner, that we assume is her baby from last year, who also comes. We named him Jim Bo (after his mom). And one skinny silver squirrel male who will come for peanuts, that we named Tux, for his white tuxedo chest. All three take them from our fingers. Boh is queen, and will chase both of the males away any time she spots one.

Boh is up on the torii gate, looking in the window at me.

But she becomes tiresome, and I will close the window to keep her out.

“I am starving. To death. Please give me a peanut?”

It’s such a pretty back yard. Above is my view from my desk, shot through the window. I wish I had more time to work out there, and do all the weeding and trimming and planting and pruning that would make it gorgeous. Notice that tall, skinny yew and the lilac?

Hummingbirds frequently perch there at the yew and lilac, but my camera and I simply cannot handle the backlighting, so I almost never get a good shot. I significantly raised the light in the photo on the left and the bird is still black. I drastically raised the light in the photo on the right, which ruins the photo, but shows the BRIGHT magenta head on that hummingbird that I simply am not able to photograph. What makes me very frustrated is that my iphone would handle this lighting situation just fine. I can’t tell if my camera lens is bad, or what.