Over the past few days when we've been out on our walks, we seen some pretty cool wildlife. Not unusual wildlife, but cool nonetheless.This morning we saw a Blue Jay. Very common bird in most of the US. We didn't get a photo, but found this free one on the Internet. The one we saw in real life was sooooo blue!!! Very handsome.
We didn't know this, but learned from Wikipedia this morning that the Blue Jay can learn to mimic human speech and also copy the cries of local hawks so well that it is sometimes difficult to tell what type of bird it is is if you are just ID'ing from sound. Cool! Maybe I should try and meow like a cat, and see where that gets me, BOL!!
We've also seen a lot of hawks around here.
You may remember that we had a hawk that frequented our yard back in Indiana - Harry the Hawk. That's a photo of Harry with his mouse prey in our former backyard.Ironically, the Blue Jay is frequent prey of the Hawk. Wonder if that's why we're suddenly seeing both this week? Interesting....sure hope that Blue Jay doesn't have to look into funeral costs, BOL!
There aren't many geese or ducks that we've seen down here, except that one that landed in the pond last Friday during our hike. Kinda nice not to have to worry about Mum stepping in duck poo, or me trying to eat it on our walks, like we did back in Indiana.
The weather the past few days has been cold and rainy. Very stormy a couple of nights. Last night we lost power (guess that's something we're going to have to get used to). Mum was all prepared with flashlights, candles and matches. During the outage, we learned that our new gas stove works on electricity to ignite the burners, when Mum was trying to warm up something on the stove. But she thought she remembered from her past that you can skip the ignition part and light the burners with a match. Worked fine and we all had a nice dinner in the dark.
Hope you all have a great weekend!!!
I didn't know about bluebirds mimic ability; sure are a lot of birds who seem to do it, though. Like the mockingbirds who imitate cell phones ("what's that cell phone doing up in that tree?").
ReplyDeleteMy sister seemed a little stunned and doubting her eyes last week when she thought she saw a bald eagle in north san jose. There are no bald eagles anywhere near here--well, apparently until late last year. There were some way out in the sierras and central valley, I guess, which was quite an improvement since the early 1980s when there were only a couple hundred maybe in far northern CA. Now, according to the paper, there is a nesting pair here, and a 3rd one has been sighted in the area as well. Very exciting. Pretty good comeback.