Ospreys & Yard Birds

I’m going to take a brief break from my driving trip through the Southwest to chronicle some developments closer to home. 

My big news is that I drove down to Seattle on Saturday (7/2/2011) and picked up my camera (a Nikon D300S) which had been in Nikon hands for a little over two weeks.  I’ve had some very occasional problems with the camera failing to recall images to the LCD screen and once displayed not being able to manipulate the images.  I wanted the camera checked out while it was still under warranty.  So I’m back in the business of photographing local birds! 

On Monday we had a very rare visit from a male Hairy woodpecker.  During the afternoon I saw it make at least three trips to our peanut feeder and each visit lasted from 10-15 minutes!  Not long after we moved into our house (almost four years ago) we had regular visits from a Hairy woodpecker but they finally stopped and I think it’s probably been 2-3 years since we’ve seen one in the yard.  We host Northern flickers and Downy woodpeckers but the Hairy woodpecker is rare here at the house.  I took photos of the bird on the feeder but was never able to get a good photo when it was staging on one of the nearby trees.  Unfortunately I haven’t seen the bird in the two days since the original sighting. 

The other big news is that I got a call from a neighbor on Tuesday afternoon that alerted me to a pair of Ospreys perched in the dead top of another neighbor’s tree.  I thought about it for a minute then went for the camera, which I have begun storing ‘assembled’ and ready for action.  Although the Osprey were less than a block away (I could actually see them from our house) I drove the car as a precaution… it would allow me a shooting platform from the window and allow me to quickly explore different angles. 

My first stop was ultimately the best and I took over 20 photos of one of the Osprey perched in the top of the tree in full sunlight.  While I was away briefly consulting with a neighbor an eagle caused one of the Osprey to fly to a different tree, but I still had the first one to shoot for probably close to 30 minutes.  These are probably the Osprey that have built a nest on an old light standard located about a mile (as the Osprey flies!) south of us.  To my knowledge these are the first Osprey to land in the neighborhood.  We’ve had very rare flyovers but that’s been about the extent of our contact.  

We now seem to be into the summer doldrums, if we can finally believe it’s summer here.  We have a pair of White-crowned sparrows visiting the yard (usually a rarity in our yard at this time of the year) and only a single Black-headed Grosbeak making a visit or two a day, although it did take a long bath in the water feature a couple of days ago.  Gone are all our exciting visitors... the Cedar waxwings, Western tanager, warblers, male Rufous hummingbirds, Anna’s hummingbirds, Evening grosbeaks and apparently all but one of the Black-headed grosbeaks.  We’ve stopped hearing the Great Horned owls that have been calling mornings and evenings for the past couple of months, but I’m sure they nested somewhere in the woods nearby.  On the other side of the coin, the hordes of immature European starlings have finally thinned so I can start being a bit more generous with my suet cakes.