Extra! Extra! A whole bunch of photos!

This sweet Red-winged blackbird is a fledgling! I will put up a video of him learning to fly tomorrow! It is so sweet, and he is so proud of himself....

Here are a few few shots from the feeders up around my place, and also of the Northern Ficker's nest...
Flicker bolts back to her nest after feeding on the paddle full of Suet we have hanging on our back porch. The male and both females feed regularly off of the feeder.
The feeders are shared by a variety of birds and no one seems to mind the other... like the Sparrow & House Finch for example...
This fledgling Starling makes a lot of noise when his mom is feeding, demanding to be fed like a big baby. She often feeds him. When she flies away, he hops back onto the feeder and feeds himself. I remembered that when I was a nanny, the kids often would rather I would feed them than feed themselves, like it was an exhausting effort to put spoon to mouth. Unless it was dessert, of course...

I am helping Eliza get her ETSY page up today, so I will just quickly post a bunch of photos of birds from all around Vancouver. Eli & I like to go junking. Actually for a while it was a bit of a compulsion. Now it's trendy and a lot of places we got cool stuff from have jacked up their prices. That's not so fun anymore. Even Value Village raised their prices to stupid levels - donated stuff, at inflated prices! Sure, in capitalist societies it's every money grubber for themselves, but when thrift shops raise their prices, and they want $500 bucks at the Sally-Anne because the levi's jacket has a big E, poor people can not dress nicely, not even in someone else's used give-aways.

Anyways, back on topic... We returned to the Great Blue Heron Colony to see if my lost cell was there. F(*&^. It wasn't... might go fully cell-less now. Seem to be saying I shouldn't have one since I have lost a cell about every 6 months or so.

It was raining so hard, but this guy just perched here on the driftwood that looks like a sign for I Love You... so it must be Bawlckey.

I haven't mentioned yet that there is a giant bunny population at Jericho. They live in the brambles... black ones, red ones, blonde ones, spotted ones, ones that look legitimately wild... right now, of course - because it's spring and these are bunnies there about a million babies! (Probably why this is also a place, where over which, you usually see an eagle or falcon flying...)

The geese are so sweet, I thought they deserved another look too. they look like dinosaurs when they are babies...

Finally sun, so fotos!

Today was a another spectacular day on the planet, if you got to enjoy this day in Vancouver, especially.

We went out early with the dogs and headed to our favorite place. We brought a jug of crushed sunflower seeds and some shelled peanuts...

It took no time at all for them to recognize us, dogs and all and start landing for breakfast. I guess with a nest full of babies you consider doing a lot of things you wouldn't normally do for sunflower seeds and peanuts, when you are a Red-winged Blackbird.

All this time we thought it was a rarity for them to have fed from our hands in the winter. Now they try to land on me before I even have the seeds out of the jug and in my hand!

The fledglings are so cute, so awkward and their wings vibrate with anxious excitement. They see the mama land and want to do it so badly, but they are way too afraid. Which is great. The babies should be left alone by humans. We NEVER touch the birds. EVER. They land on our hand, and eat the proper safe clean food and leave when they want to.

There is a respect we have for them, and don't try to tame them or pet them at all. We just stand very still and let them eat, like we are human bird feeders.

What a palmful of sunflower seeds will get you...

One of the first sights & sounds of spring, is the spectacular and magnificent Red-Winged Blackbird. They are loud, happy and songful. At first glance you might think that the male has all the decor, all the flare and personality... but behind every successful man is a beautiful and more successful woman- in a lot of cases, so they say...

Jill's car stinks like something dead this morning so I drove her to work so I could take it in and clean it for her. We aren't sure what the heck is under the dog blankets in the backseat, but we are going to find out as soon as I post today's story. So starts today, and why we drove to the beach with the dogs in the middle of the week- I had the car. We decided to go to Jerry's Cove and see the birds. Jill left a bag of shelled sunflower seeds in the front seat so we carried those to the pond.

We often attempt to hand feed the Red-Winged Blackbirds, unsuccessfully except for 2 rare moments where Eliza fed a male, and a few months later, I fed a female. We are careful to get the proper food for the birds we feed. We do not feed the ducks bread like I did when I was a kid, apparently it's not good for them. Now we buy duck food or seeds & nuts. I reached into the sunflower bag and grabbed a palmful. I barely had my arm out stretched when the first bird landed...

She landed with no hesitation and stuffed her beak full with seeds. A few other females hovered over me waiting for their turn to land. They were very respectful of each other and took turns filling their beaks to the brim before flying off. If you want a closer look at the pictures I post, just click on them and they enlarge... This was the first close-up look at these gals we have ever had! They have a wonderful orange smudge on their shoulders, well some of them do, their markings are so beautiful.

We stood there feeding them for about twenty minutes before walking the dogs around the rest of the park.

Eliza feeds the hungry nesting mothers. We saw a few fledgling Red-Winged Blackbirds in the reeds near the bridge. We left a handful of seeds on the railing for them. It must really work up an appetite learning how to fly, and teaching someone to fly. Why are baby birds almost twice the size of their parents? Can you imagine if that were true fro everything that hatched out of an egg? Giant Eagles, turtles & alligators...

So we ran out of seeds and I have another errand added to my day. Once you start feeding a few birds, they seem to really make a point of letting you know that you now have a new responsibility. I learned to keep a balance with Bawckey, my backyard wild crow pet. Our pets are on the raw food diet, and I was giving Bawckey the leftover cat food - because it was too expensive to waste and not to name names, but Pippi (our cat) is Picki. Anyways, I would set out the cat dish and this one crow would eat it. I went away for a few weeks and when I came back, Sparrow (my dog) & I were on our way to the coffee shop, he swooped down and scolded both of us. So now he only gets fed occasionally. I save those leftovers and then every once and a while I feed him, like once a week or twice. But the bird feeders on the other hand feed a lot of different guys, so we try to keep that full. And the suet paddles are there for the Northern Flickers, and monopolized by the Starlings - who happen to be Jill's faves.

I just have a thing for the Red-Winged Blackbirds right now though. The day Eliza fed her first one, I told my mom about it and she mentioned hearing something about them in the news that day. Turns out that this particular bird has a strange phenomenon surrounding it. One that worries me and gets my head thinking about the conspiracy to hide the real facts about why, thousands of these birds spontaneously fell from the sky, more than once. Fireworks? I doubt it. And this isn't the first time it has happened... I am glad our friends at the Cove are safe for now. I shudder when I think that this happens to be located on some pretty valuable real estate. Our country is not as protected as we all like to think. Our National Parks are in jeopardy, they are over used and under funded. No one should ever have to fight to protect nature, it should be protected naturally.

If no one wants corporations polluting our water and our precious ecosystems, how do they continue to do it? I personally want to try to stop all of this planet raping from continuing in my neck of the woods. I was part of an International Greenpeace demonstration a few years ago, well more than a few now - but groups of us all over the planet were trying to get corporations to listen by just collectively boycotting one company and showing them all that we had the power and wherewithal to pull it off. A group of us simultaneously walked onto ESSO gas bars and chained ourselves to the pumps and asked folks to buy their gas somewhere else. It was the first time I had participated in something that would certainly lead to my arrest. It was an interesting study in human behavior. We were calm and peaceful, but many of the customers got really defensive. A lot of them were shouting that the climate crisis threat was all a bunch of crap made up by tree huggers like Greenpeace. It's so funny how someone can shout something at you and actually think it's insulting, "TREEHUGGER!" Anyways, I was arrested and thrown in the slammer. But that's another story.

Now to find out what died/is dead in the backseat of Jill's car... Have a nice day, if you are so inclined.