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The Daily Bucket is a nature refuge. We amicably discuss animals, weather, climate, soil, plants, waters and note life’s patterns.
We invite you to note what you are seeing around you in your own part of the world, and to share your observations in the comments below.
Each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the phenological patterns that are quietly unwinding around us. To have the Daily Bucket in your Activity Stream, visit Backyard Science’s profile page and click on Follow.
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My video editing program gave me fits and starts and quite a bit of frustration, just figuring out how to get subtitles/captions into the video, but after a couple hours of dinking around with it, I managed to figure it out and now it will be much less cumbersome in the future.
Monday, January 29, at the wastewater treatment plant. The sun came out in the afternoon at just the time I had hoped for, so I pedaled over and set my tripod with big microphone on the camera, and took a whopping six-something minutes worth of video. Edited it down to under two. There was almost no vocalization from the ducks on the pond; you can hear the airplane taking off from the nearby airport, though, at the 1:10 mark. Well, I had hoped for the Bald Eagles, but you can only get what’s out there and it’s seldom that you get to be choosy. It was a gorgeous day at all extents, regardless.
The next afternoon, the 30th, was truly bright and sunny, so I pedaled on out to “Hawk Alley” (Quincy Junction Road), and was well rewarded.
This is a Google Earth streetview looking down Quincy Junction Road, at about the usual start point for my “hawk watch”.
It’s about one mile from here to the vanishing point of the roadway. Along this stretch of the road it is not unusual at this time of the year to be able to spot a half-dozen individual hawks; sometimes Prairie Falcon and American Kestrel.
In the order I came across them:
Red-tailed Hawk #1
Same as above, cropped in:
That white on the face is pretty neat.
Then it left the pole and flew over to this cable. And I couldn’t focus. It flew off again immediately after this snap.
Red-tailed Hawk #2. Darned wire in the way.
Ferruginous Hawk; about two hundred yards distance.
Note heat shimmer; makes real sharp photos difficult.
Cropped in
This one came out best.
Hadn’t seen one since November. What a beauty.
Red-tailed Hawk #3
(Title photo cropped from this one)
Mallard duck, to cap the day. I really liked the way the sun drew this drake’s colors out.
Now it’s your turn. What’s happening in your world, nature-wise? Let us know in the comments, and if you have any photos do please share them, along with your location.
