Happy New Year!

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Happy New Year:  Doin' the Green Jay dance!

It's a windy cool New Year's Day.  (I realize, of course, that's relative--most parts of the country would like a day in the 60's but after 88 degrees yesterday, we were hoping for better.  We got home from cold Missouri last night just before the wind switched around from the north and dropped temps a bit. Though not cold by most standards, it's windy by anyone's--at least 30 mph is my guess.

Even before helping unload the car, I turned on hoses to fill up baths as soon as we got home yesterday evening. With no rain since about July, the birds seemed delighted this morning to find saucers filled and drippers dripping.  Green Jays and Kiskadees sounded like they were celebrating the New Year, loud despite the wind.  No birds celebrate quite as much as Green Jays.  The photo above is a favorite one from summer 2010.  Those jays looked as though they were dancing--that's not wind blowing their feathers, but sheer jiggling, twisting joy! Today was also a celebration. 

Just after dawn this morning I took the dogs out and looked eagerly for the first bird of 2011.  I heard it rather than saw it at first--a very loud Buff-bellied Hummingbird sitting in the fiddlewood near the hummingbird feeder near the garage. Our common resident hummer, Buff-bellieds are larger than the small Ruby-throated Hummingbirds and much noisier. Males have bright red beaks and all have green backs, heads, and throats with buff breasts and bright rust-orange tails.  Certainly a worthy New Year's bird.



I'm adding something to the blog today.  Reviving  my twitter account, I have linked tweets to this blog (right sidebar) and will try to add yard-bird updates daily.  Of course in 140 characters I can't list all the birds for a day, but I can add the new ones for the year.  This is mostly for my benefit since I want to keep records of first-of-season appearances and birds to remember. When I started my blog (exactly a year ago today), it was sort of on a whim when I couldn't find the journal I usually wrote nature sightings in.  I wanted a misplace-proof place to record the goings-ons in the yard. I am really pleased with how it turned out, except for the fact that I ended up writing longer and more infrequent posts than I had envisioned.  Adding tweets may solve the problem of not really recording enough details to help me compare the sightings from year to year.

Birds aren't all we see from the yard and I'll tweet/ list other animals as well.  I'm disappointed that I wasn't able to capture photos of dolphins that swim in the Arroyo--maybe in the new year I'll be luckier.  Neither did I shoot (with camera, of course) a Bobcat or Javelina.  The best mammal sighting ever was an ocelot about 13 years ago.  I don't even hope to see another of those severely endangered cats from my window.

Here are a couple of other mammals seen from the house. I don't know for sure what the red deer is--it's definitely not our native white-tailed deer, being much larger and redder.  We saw it during the Big Sit in October (which may prove that there are all sorts of surprises to see if you are just sitting and looking.  As I said a couple of days ago about the Pine Warbler,  I think many birds are here that I never see.  And I think anyone that spends as much time looking --and sitting--as I do would see lots more birds and other critters than they do).

The people who own the ranch land across the arroyo must import exotics for hunting.  Besides this animal (Red Deer?  Red Stag?  Looks like the ones we saw in Scotland),  we've seen Nilgai which are commonly imported to ranches around Texas.  (Yesterday just before dark I heard guns and hoped the targets were running fast.)

The wind is still howling (as Winnie the Pooh would say, it's a "Blustery Day"), but the sun is shining and the temperature has climbed above 70.  I'll go see what else I can see from the windows on this first day of 2011.  I wish the best of days and all of nature's blessings to all of you in the New Year!