Monday, January 22, 2007

nature study

I found a dead bird in the garage today. It's an Audubon's Warbler, aka Yellow-Rumped Warbler (or "Butterbutt" as we used to call them in bird survey class). It was a strange place to find a bird, as the garage door tends to only be open long enough to park a car and unload stuff, the cats are never in the garage, and the bird was right in the middle between the cars so it's not as though it "rode in" on a bumper. Anyway, never get to see one quite that close up most of the time, and they are beautiful, so I took a few pics before putting it to rest in the garden. I never knew there was a yellow spot on the top of the head.




2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can I add this to my lifetime list of birds I have observed, or are there rules against observing something in a blog? Your photos are much clearer than my eyesight, so I have seen it better than I would have in real life.

I think the light marks on the tailfeathers are interesting, the way they look like lines that point to the center.

And why can't we have chickens that have really yellow feathers like this? Or green or blue like a parrot?

JJ

Katherine Plumer said...

Well, the fact that it's a photo of a dead bird on a blog might make it hard to add to your life list.. There are tons of these little guys around right now! They've been out bouncing around the yard all day with the Juncos.

The color is a little off in the pic. I tried to correct it but the yellow is still too green. It really is a more buttery color than that. (I took the pics under flourescent lighting, it was dark outside at the time).

Oh, and when colored pencils control things, chickens can be *ANY* color. hee hee! ;-)