Spring has Sprung

What a difference a month and a half makes. We have gone from frigid temperatures and snow from storm Uri to spring green showing up in the form of new leaves on most of the trees and green grass and clear blue skies.

I had a flock of cedar waxwings visit my bald cypress today. I'm not sure if they were eating buds or bugs but they stayed there for quite a while and I got some nice pictures of them. It would have been nice to have the sun at a different angle but you take what you can get. At least the birds were so engrossed in what they were doing that they ignored me. Cedar waxwings are usually flighty and difficult to capture "on film". They were also much less vocal than I am used to. I love the sounds cedar waxwings make but they were pretty quiet today.

What birds have you seen recently?

Cedar Waxwing Invasion

This makes three weeks in a row that I have posted about birds. I will get back to other topics, however the invasion of cedar waxwings I witnessed this morning was something I just had to share right away. I have previously had small flocks of around 25 or less land on my bald cypress by my pond and stream. Sometimes they will drop down and get a drink as you saw in my last post.

Today's flock outdid anything I have seen before. The flock on the tree at any

one time was around 80 - 100 birds. The photo above is just a portion of the flock. Click to enlarge it and see how many you can count. Let me know in the comments below. The cedar waxwings dropped into the stream in shifts of up to about 25 at any one time to get a drink. This went on for several minutes. Fewer clouds would have been nice so I could have used more depth of field and a quicker shutter speed. I did get better images than I expected though, while I was shooting.

Cedar waxwings are one of the bird species that have a good chance of being
seen during the Dalworthington Gardens' Great Backyard Bird Count event on Saturday, February 17 in Gardens Park. If you are in the area, grab your binoculars, camera and/or iOS or Android device with a bird identification app such as Merlin and join us in the community room at 10 am for a presentation before we break into small groups to count birds. After birding, come back to the community room to swap stories of what birds you sighted and make some origami birds to take home with you.

Frozen Morning - Birds Flock to Open Water

The official thermometer at the airport read 11 degrees Fahrenheit for this morning's low. Closer to home, Arlington registered 6 degrees. These are not wind chill temps but actual air temperatures. At these temperatures many still bodies of water that birds would make there way to for a drink would have been frozen over like the pond portion of my water feature as seen in the photo of the mourning dove walking across the ice. The waterfall and stream flowed fast enough to stay open and became a mecca for birds looking for a drink. I saw some year round bird species as well as some of the visitors that

come through this time of year. The photos were all taken this morning and captured many of the species that stopped for some water. Click on the images to enlarge them. With the Great Backyard Bird Count just one month away, get to know these bird species because you are likely to find some or all of them if you join the DWG Backyard Bird Count event on February 17, 2018.

Male and female House finch and Cedar waxwing

Yellow-rumped warblers with ice in the background

Male Bluebird (Do you see his reflection in the waterfall?)

Goldfinch and Chipping sparrow