Birds of a Feather

I'm heading out for a conference for a few days and have been hen-pecked to get this post out. So I'll let it fly.

There isn't much color around the farm. We were hoping for a number of flowers and plants to spring up in, uh, spring. But the color has been pretty limited. The fact of the matter is most color is coming from the bird life. Wingman and I typically do a spring bird count for-geesh, I don't even know who the organization is. But we had to miss that weekend, so he came out this past Saturday to "bird" here at Sycamore Hill.

I saw his car pull up. I heard the car door shut. But as I typed up an early Saturday morning response to a certain bureaucrat I kept waiting for a knock on the door. Finally I asked my son if Mr. Wingman was here. Yep. So I stuck my head out the screen door and he was staring up into a tree, binoculars in hand. And he waved me out.

He had been watching a Scarlet Tanager. And I think he was going to keep that experience all to himself until I poked my head out the door. While these birds are red, they tend to be a little hard to spot because they typically hang out in the tree tops....which is where our friend was. Both Wingman and I commented that this was only the second time we had ever seen one in our lives. The rest of the day was a little less eventful, maybe because my son went along and did as much chatting as the birds. But Wingman said the tanager made his whole day.

A few days later he asked when I was going to blog on the bird, sending along a "how to make your property ripe for tanagers" link. I responded and said he was still basking in the siting to which he responded by saying he's one of a few people he knows who can actually "see" things around him. I think I'm one of those on his list.

The next day I saw an Indigo Bunting and a pair of Yellow-Rumped Warblers. Told you it's getting colorful.