Our bird watching this year started out slowly, but we more than made up for the late start with the richness of our sightings. Not only do we have the daily viewing exposure of our bike rides, but our living room has a triple sliding glass door which opens out onto a large screened-in porch, which overlooks our pool and our backyard.
Directly across from the pool sits a ten-foot long, eight-foot high cluster of old thick bougainvillea bushes. Our couches inside look out over all this, so our binoculars and camera are always right at hand, ready for bird sightings.
Thinking for months that we’d be leaving “next month”, we put off weeding the bougainvillea for a month or two. It’s a nasty thankless job with all those thorns, but it does give a nice clean look to the yard.
After a month or so, Chelsea and I noticed a profusion of butterflies, all of them hovering around the weeds in the bougainvillea. We loved all the colors and flight patterns, and thought, well this is good! Then in November the unbelievable happened.
During breakfast one morning before Thanksgiving I spotted a red flash in the bougainvillea, so I grabbed the binoculars, thinking it was another cardinal. But something wasn’t right. This bird had way too many colors for a cardinal, so I described them for Chelsea. She leaped for our Audubon bird guide, and could hardly talk when she discovered we were seeing a painted bunting.
To give you the back-story on the buntings, Chelsea and I spent ten days at St. Augustine Beach, Florida, back in July of 2007. Our first day we’d made the acquaintance of John Cheatwood, an AmeriCorps volunteer.
John took us on several tours, describing plant life, what birds to expect, and more. He happened to mention the painted buntings, but admitted they were very rare. He did tell us the best places and times of day to sight them.
We spent ten days searching for those buntings, and finally spotted one high on a telephone wire at sunrise on our last morning. Since the painted bunting was backlit, it was hard to tell much, but we were thrilled to have any sighting at all.
Fast-forward four years, and here we are with painted buntings in our own back yard. Life just couldn’t get any better.
We looked up the buntings’ habitat and discovered that they like “brushy tangles”. We looked at each other, looked at our weedy bougainvillea, and said, yep, looks like a brushy tangle to us! No more guilt over not weeding. It’s now our “brushy tangle”.
The painted buntings stayed for a week or so, then turned up again in January and February. We discovered too that it wasn’t only painted buntings that liked our brushy tangle. We spotted an amazing number of birds, and got photos of as many as we could.
The photo thing was a challenge though, as we had a screened-in porch, and the screens make for fuzzy photos, but we’d scare the birds away if we opened the screen doors. Finally one day, when the painted buntings returned, we pulled one section of screening loose, rolled it upward, and tied it off, thus giving us our very own backyard “bird blind”.
The mosquito and fly population increased in our house, but so did the quality of the photos, so we called it even and left the screen rolled up.
Just before Christmas we visited the Gumbo Limbo Nature Preserve in Boca Raton. In addition to being a turtle conservation facility, they have a special butterfly preserve. Chelsea and I wandered through with the rest of our family, noticing that the butterfly preserve had the same weeds we had in our bougainvillea. We got a big chuckle out of that.
I’m sure that everyone who saw our backyard was dying to fix the dangling screen and to call a gardener to clean up that weedy mess in our bougainvillea, but to us, and to the butterflies and birds using it, it was a slice of paradise.
Those of you who have been following us know that we have a fair number of squirrel stories over the last few years. We have another one, but I’m happy to report this one doesn’t involve any destruction of our property.
We have many large trees in our yard, and combined with utility poles and utility wires, it’s an aerial playground for the squirrels. One day I looked up and saw three squirrels running in formation across the wires. Suddenly the one in the middle lost his balance and swung wildly upside down. With another squirrel literally on its tail, the middle one just kept running, but upside down, hanging from the wire, keeping pace with the others.
I laughed and told Chelsea about it. So help me, a few weeks later it happened again, but the squirrel was by himself. Chelsea was there with the camera, so we got some great photos of the squirrel hanging upside down while running the length of the wire, then catching its breath at the other end.
For those who are bird watchers, I thought I’d throw in our list of backyard birds we catalogued over the months. The list includes a few we saw on our bike trips, but doesn’t include all the water/shore birds we see. I’m sure I’ve missed some, but here you are for now. And do check the photos of the birds, butterflies and squirrels.
Blue-gray gnatcatchers
Loggerhead shrikes
Kingfisher
American kestrel
Painted buntings (we were up to two males and three females by closing day!)
Black and white warblers
Brown thrasher
Cardinals
Morning doves
Rock doves
Blue jays
Mockingbirds
Downey woodpecker
Pileated woodpecker
Red-bellied woodpecker
Palm warblers
Prairie warbler
Hummingbirds, both rufus and ruby-throated
Magnolia warbler
Gray catbird