Early this morning, we saw the Red-tailed hawks trade places in the nest. This gives the mate a chance to grab a bite to eat while the other incubates the eggs we hope are in there.
Little birds tend to chase the hawks away from their territories. Even though the hawks are 3 times bigger than the little ones, they meekly oblige by moving away.
We saw not only the Red-tail Hawks today, but a bald eagle to boot. The hawks were making eyes at each other and the eagle was making colonic bombardments. They were getting soaked.
It’s hard to regard the bald eagle as a majestic bird when its head feathers are flattened down like it’s been styling with Brylcreem—and it lets fly with intestinal ammo. Anyway, we’re doubling down on bird videos today.
We got this sudden string of thunderstorms come up this afternoon in eastern Iowa and it blew pretty hard briefly for a short while. We got barely pea-sized hail. It buffeted the Red-tail Hawk around so much I couldn’t really tell which end of it was up. And then it quickly calmed down. If you don’t like the weather in Iowa-just wait a bit.
This is a follow up video of the Red-tailed hawks nesting in the outlet beyond our back yard. This time it seems to be fixing up the nest. We can’t tell whether they have eggs in it or not. It was pretty windy today, so the view is even more challenging.
Sena found a Red-tailed hawk on a nest in the outlot beyond our back yard. At first, I thought it was too early for that sort of thing. Sure enough, today we went for a walk and both saw it.
This has been a common theme for us. Over 20 years ago she saw a coyote in the back yard of another house in a different neighborhood. I didn’t really believe it—until our next-door neighbor asked us if we’d seen that “coyote” out in the back yard. We never got a chance to get a picture of it.
And then there was the time she saw (actually heard it before she saw it) a pileated woodpecker in the backyard of another house we lived in about 12 years ago. I doubted it then, too. But she got a picture to prove it. It just goes to show you—I never learn.
We saw some kind of raptor today in our back yard and I couldn’t tell for sure if it was a Red-tail hawk or not. I got the video with an old Canon point-and-shoot through a window at 7:45 in the morning and she sky was overcast. It had a dark spot below its eye, mostly white breast feathers. The back feathers looked mostly brownish. It didn’t look like it had been banded.
It looked like its left foot might have been injured. It looked almost black. It held its left leg up most of the time while perched in a tree, but lowered it so it could scratch its face with the right foot. It’s blurry but you can see its left foot starting at the about 44:15 mark in the video.
I checked a couple of websites with photos of common Iowa raptors, but this bird doesn’t seem to closely resemble any of them.
A couple of days ago, last year’s pesky female robin came back to peck at one of the basement windows. It’s a window well and she looks like she might be bringing next materials to it. She’s also beating at the window with her wings, as though she sees her reflection—despite the window film Sena applied to it.
I’m pretty sure this is the same robin who twisted her head around backward, Exorcist style, to stare balefully at me last spring.
She does this during the day. They sleep at night, thank goodness. But at the crack of dawn, she’s out quixotically pecking and flapping at the windows like they’re windmills.
We’re also on the lookout for the house finch pair. They seem to be scouting the covered back porch fan as a likely spot for a nest.
This morning, I got a snapshot of a male house finch sitting on the back porch fence post. He’s a proud looking fellow. I saw the female a minute earlier but could not catch a picture of her.
It’s spring; they’re probably a mating pair and we saw them last year. So, there will soon be eggs somewhere out in the woods past our back yard. There will probably be chicks soon.
Maybe the chicks will survive. I remember during the month of May in 2019, I was keeping watch on a nest of house finches just outside of my office window. I would go out every day to a skinny little juniper tree, part the branches, and snap pictures of the eggs and later, the squirming hatchlings.
One day, I heard a noise like the flapping of big sheets outside my window. When I finally looked out, I saw the biggest crow I’d ever seen, just taking off with all of the nestlings clenched in its beak.
The mother house finch arrived minutes later and searched frantically for her chicks for over half an hour.
It wasn’t until then that I learned I was at fault for exposing the hiding place of the nest in the tree. I went there daily and spread the branches, probably while the crow watched me from high above in the sky.
I thought I learned my lesson, but I didn’t. In May of 2024, a mating pair of house finches built a nest in our artificial Christmas tree right on our front porch, a step away from the front door. The ruddy male would feed the female, who had laid 4 eggs.
I set up a critter cam on a tripod and filmed them for days. Every time I hustled out there to get the camera to download the videos, I scared the birds off. We watched for 17 days. The typical time to hatching is about 14 days. I finally tossed the whole thing out in the back yard.
There are a red tail hawks, turkey vultures, and crows all over the sky. I hope the house finches know better than to build a nest in any of the big pots on our porch. I know better than to draw attention to them now.
I caught sight of a couple of robins today and managed to get a fair snapshot of one. They’re casing our back yard for nesting sites. I’m also wondering if they’ll attack their reflections in our windows now that Sena covered them with plastic overlays last year.
So far, they sit high up in the trees-and they just eyeball me.
The weather was superb yesterday and we visited our favorite walking trail out at Terry Trueblood Recreation Area—along with a lot of people who had the same idea. It was around 60 degrees and not a cloud in the azure blue sky.
The highlight was the big flocks of white birds with black markings under the wings sailing over Sand Lake. Observers we encountered had different opinions about what species they were.
At first, I thought they were pelicans, which are frequent visitors at the park. On the other hand, a few thought they were storks and for a while I took their side. The further we walked and the more video I got, and the more people we talked with, the less sure we were about these very large white birds. Many people were very sure they were pelicans.
After we got home, I looked on the internet for education about how to tell the difference between storks and pelicans—and was convinced that the birds we saw were pelicans. I was able to enlarge a picture I pulled from one of my video clips which showed clearly the large bill.
I guess this is a good place for Dixon Lanier Merritt’s 1910 limerick about the pelican:
“A wonderful bird is the Pelican.
His beak can hold more than his belly can.
He can hold in his beak
Enough food for a week!
But I’m darned if I know how the hellican!”
Despite the tall tales about storks bearing babies, the fact is their beaks are narrow.
So, this actually takes me back to the one person on our walk who was convinced that the large, wheeling birds were storks. She joked around about the idea a little and asked Sena if she knew the story about how Dumbo was born. It just so happened was lost on us because we’d never seen the 1941 Disney film Dumbo and it turns out that a stork brought Dumbo to the train dragging a car full of elephants, one of which was Mrs. Dumbo.
And there’s a very complicated explanation of the stork myth about them delivering babies to mothers—although not in their beaks but in a bundle.
Aside from the pelicans, we saw many signs of spring, including buds on the trees, the ice melting on Sand Lake, and people gazing at the sky-waiting for spring.
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