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Various shots from yesterday afternoon and evening at Wayne Fitzgerrell State Park … in no particular order:
Sunday morning, Diane looks out her living-room window and sees Kiddle getting ready to pounce on something. Diane takes a closer look and realizes it’s red-tailed HAWK that the energetic (if not necessarily the brightest) kitty-cat is fixin’ to attack. She calls to Kiddle and shoos the hawk away — with its prey, a squirrel.
(I might add here that Kiddle got HER first squirrel — that I know of — over the weekend. Last weekend, she got her first bird.)
Then Diane calls me, and I head over with camera in hand. Got within five or six feet of the hawk as it dined on its kill at the vacant house across the street before the bird flew up to a nearby tree. I walked over to the tree, and the hawk flew to another tree. I repeated this process two or three times, hoping to send the hawk on its way back to the wilderness and away from the animals in THIS neighborhood.
Right here, in the middle o’ town:
My new theory on the cardinal who seems to adore my Grand Am is that she is protecting her nest and/or her mate from intruders/predators — not from my car, but from her own reflection in the window of my car, which she perceives as being another (female) bird.
Or maybe she is in love. Who knows? Either way, she doesn’t seem to mind me getting relatively close (within 30 feet or so) and taking a few pictures, so what do I care? (Except she does have this nasty habit of pooping on top of the car door!)
Eventually, a male cardinal made an appearance. Only for a few seconds, though, and then they flew off to who knows where … but they’ll be back, I’m sure. I hope!
The other day whilst walking out to my car, I noticed this female cardinal was perched on the passenger side mirror. Then the cardinal flew to the windshield and sort of hovered there, like a hummingbird, looking inside the car. She then flew to the passenger side window, kept looking inside, and then flew away.
Today when I arrived home from work, I heard this chirping. I looked up and saw the cardinal in the low branches of a tree next to my driveway. Quickly, she made her way to the driver’s side mirror, and then spent the next few minutes flying back and forth from the clothesline to the mirror to the driver’s side window.
I think she’s in love (or something like it) with my car!
I don’t mind, really, ’cause it’s not like my car is in a committed relationship with anyone but me (I have a feeling it’s still a bit pissed over the whole stuck-in-the-mud incident); in fact, I was glad to be able to snap so many shots of the cardinal while she flitted back and forth. I mean, I prefer male cardinals because they’re so much prettier (how shallow is that?!), but they are amongst the flightiest birds around — and female cardinals are even more hyper!
Mom shot this a while back and sent it to me last night:
Through the tattered screen, earlier today:
I don’t care all that much for blue jays ’cause they seem rather mean-spirited and grouchy. However, I like to see them in flight, those glints of blue in the sunlight.
They remind me of cardinals/redbirds, only … well, they’re blue. (They’re both rather flighty and unpredictable. Hard to shoot, generally.)
Stolen Moments 