A Birdy Day
by Arthur
Posted on Sunday, May 31st, 2009 at 8:51 pm CET
We woke up this morning to a new backyard bird: a Blue Jay! Finally we saw one of these beautiful birds at our home. I called it a few days ago when I wrote that we were overdue on a Blue Jay. Pretty cool:
We got up early for another bird walk with one of the birding clubs in the area. We’ve been doing this every weekend the last few weeks. This time we met with Lake Cook Audubon at McHenry Dam in Moraine Hills State Park at 7:30. We walked the loop trail for about 4 hours and saw 37 different bird species including 6 new lifers (Orchard Oriole and several warblers)! We had a great time.
Another cool animal we saw was this large Bullfrog. There were actually several of them and they made an extremely loud call, which is reminiscent of the roar of a bull, hence its name (you can see/hear it here).
In the afternoon we went over to Home Depot to get supplies for a new bird feeder. For a while we’ve wanted to get a better setup with stronger poles than we’ve been using. They sell expensive pole systems at wild bird stores but we thought we could do it better and cheaper by making it ourselves. So we bought some plumbing pipes and made the following with help from Amy’s dad:
See Amy’s post about the new bird feeder for more information on how its made.
Now we can finally hang our Wingscapes Birdcam at a good place and hopefully get some more interesting shots than those from ground level. Here’s one of the first birds, a House Finch, using the new feeder and photographed by the Birdcam:
We woke up this morning to a new backyard bird: a Blue Jay! Finally we saw one of these beautiful birds at our home. I called it a few days ago when I wrote that we were overdue on a Blue Jay. Pretty cool:
We got up early for another bird walk with one of the birding clubs in the area. We’ve been doing this every weekend the last few weeks. This time we met with Lake Cook Audubon at McHenry Dam in Moraine Hills State Park at 7:30. We walked the loop trail for about 4 hours and saw 37 different bird species including 6 new lifers (Orchard Oriole and several warblers)! We had a great time.
Another cool animal we saw was this large Bullfrog. There were actually several of them and they made an extremely loud call, which is reminiscent of the roar of a bull, hence its name (you can see/hear it here).
In the afternoon we went over to Home Depot to get supplies for a new bird feeder. For a while we’ve wanted to get a better setup with stronger poles than we’ve been using. They sell expensive pole systems at wild bird stores but we thought we could do it better and cheaper by making it ourselves. So we bought some plumbing pipes and made the following with help from Amy’s dad:
See Amy’s post about the new bird feeder for more information on how its made.
Now we can finally hang our Wingscapes Birdcam at a good place and hopefully get some more interesting shots than those from ground level. Here’s one of the first birds, a House Finch, using the new feeder and photographed by the Birdcam:
9:37 pm
You will grow to dislike the Blue Jay’s…they scare off the other birds and can be very mean…even dive bombing people at times. Beware.