80AcresOnline

Today’s wildlife experience was an armadillo, drinking noisily (they slurp, sounding rather like dogs) from the overflow guzzler at Fox Pavilion when we came back around that way after a long, two-hour stroll around the place.   I thought I’d turned the water off completely, but some grit must’ve been in the faucet, because the water had overflowed.

Read the rest of this entry »

We have four or five different bird populations on the place, and the first year I thought the winter-resident bunch were the dullest.  After all, it’s not their breeding season, so those that have a bright breeding plumage don’t have it here.   Then there are the sparrows–for two years they defeated my attempts at bird identification because I didn’t spend enough time learning which small streaky brown bird was which.

Then I spent a winter sitting out in the dry woods with binoculars day after day and discovered the beauty of winter sparrows.  Now the winter birds are one of my favorite subgroups.  They can’t compete with the painted buntings we get in late spring (nothing can!) but I enjoy them.   And the  American goldfinches, arriving all brown,  with the black-and-white echelons of their wingtips on the back, gradually transform toward spring into the familiar yellow and black northerners see.

Read the rest of this entry »