We had a couple of new visitors to the feeders today. A pair of Red-Bellied Woodpeckers spent a great deal of time at the feeder. (Supposedly, they get their name from a red spot on the belly, but my bird book says "it's usually hard to see...")
This is the male (the red head on the female doesn't come all the way to the beak). He has taken a corn kernel from the feeder. As we watched, he would stick the kernel into a crevice in the bark, then hammer at it with his beak until he broke off smaller parts which he then ate.
After a while, this fellow came along and was cleaning up grains that had fallen to the ground from the feeders --
He tried very hard to eat directly from the feeders, which are supposed to be "squirrel-proof," but finally gave up and feasted from the ground.
For a good share of the afternoon, we could hear rumbling in the distance, which finally got closer and closer. There was a great many loud claps of thunder, then the rain began. You can see that the road alongside Auntie Violet has become a virtual lake --
The campsites on the other side of us (which are all reserved for Memorial Day campers) got pretty soggy looking --
The rain came down hard for about half an hour, then the storm moved on and we could hear it continue to rumble in the distance --
I'm sure by morning it will be hard to tell that there had been any standing water!
No comments:
Post a Comment