February 21, 2015
(This is part of a 365 project during my 70th year where I write and
illustrate a blog on each day's gift.)
Just one minute of cold wind exposure
to my hands this morning at our community beach convinced me that I would not
be doing a photo safari today. It is
impossible to hold the camera and release the shutter with mittens on and my
exposed fingers, even for such a brief time, quickly began to hurt from the
cold. I had gone to Gray’s Creek with my camera to check how frozen it was.
Around 1983, the creek had frozen solid enough for ice-skating and a VW towing
a picnic table on the ice. Today the cold was brutal so I decided any photographs
would be from the inside looking out.
With the television turned off, I sat in my kitchen, looking out through a
mostly clean window for a nearly an hour, and watched our backyard
birds vying for position on one of the feeders. They perched on the porch
railing or the edge of the house roof or the top of the feeder stand. I couldn't
quite figure out the pecking order but the dark-eyed juncos seemed to wield the
most power.
While snowflakes dotted the landscape, I watched as a dark-eyed junco and a
white-throated sparrow perched on the railing, almost like neighbors talking in
a backyard. The white-throated sparrows I saw were the tan-striped variety
rather than the white-striped. Interesting notes: (1) the white-striped adults
tend to mate with the tan-striped birds; white- and tan-striped males and
white-striped females sing, but tan-striped females do not. I guess they are
the introverts of the white-throated sparrows.
My
gift today was bird-a-vision.
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