grace_patton's Journal

These days getting out is rather difficult for me, as it maybe is for others as well. On days when it seems trying to get out of bed, my window lets the light spill in with small shadows in the shapes of birds. There are six house finches that live in the apartment complex that I feed with suet and sunflower seeds. Three pairs of birds as far as I can tell, 3 females and 3 males who show up almost on the clock at 4AM every morning and then religiously throughout the day. Before everything shut down and there was more to do, it took quite a bit of convincing to get my mom to allow me to put up a bird feeder, but as there is nothing to do now, and we spend all of our time at home, a bird feeder just seemed natural.
It's so strange that these birds don't know me but I feel as though I know them so well. Yesterday I only saw 4 birds for the entire day and I was so worried something had happened to the other couple. Today they came back and I am breathing with slightly more ease. A few weeks ago (maybe? what is time) the finches were displaying ritual feeding behavior, the female bows to the male and opens her mouth, and the male sticks his beak in her mouth. They are LOUD when they do this, the female screams to the male. "Mock regurgitation" doesn't sound that pleasant but when you know it's romantic there's something rather endearing about it.
They can't talk to me but they talk to each other and I listen. Ironically I really struggle to identify bird songs, all the different notes become jumbled in my brain but I swear I can tell who's perched outside my window by just one call. I wake up to these birds, and on nights I can't sleep, I fall asleep to these birds. They don't know me but I definitely know them.

Walked down a trail with mainly forest edges, but also through some dense woods. On the forest edges there were many, many red-winged blackbirds all perched on the same large tree. There didn't seem to be mob mentality when a few birds flew away, but rather suddenly they all flew away at once. The black-capped chickadees are always fun to watch. They are hard to spot when in motion but once they are perched they become quite vocal and move almost in tandem with one another. The presence of very loud crows seemed to frequently make the birds scatter and/or become quite vocal themselves. The crows may have been after something because they were extremely loud and flying actively. Circling over the forest was also quite common for the crows. The house finches were in pairs of male and female which does correspond to their breeding season. High activity in the birds was not surprising considering the increasing day lengths, however because we had a snowstorm I would suspect that there wasn't as much activity as there usually would be.

Went birding in Centennial Woods. Today I spent a lot of time observing crows. This time of year in Vermont always attracts large groups of crows. Even driving to Shelburne resulted in spotting a murder of about 15 crows along the roadside. In Centennial Woods my results were about the same. There are crows everywhere and black-capped chickadees sparingly (that I could see). I was hoping to spot a downy woodpecker but my luck did not prevail. Crow flight patterns are slow, deep, methodological flaps. I don't see them gliding very frequently (as you would with a red-tailed hawk) and often they are on the ground in the first place. In comparison to chickadees, whose flight pattern is sporadic and rapid. Chickadees have very small wings and bodies which makes it easier for them to fly in small spaces and crowded wooded areas.