One of the nice things about spring is the constant change. New birds arrive in the area, new shoots and blossoms appear every few days and, the beech leaves finally fall to the ground!
I filled the feeder on Friday evening with sunflower seeds and we awoke the next morning to feeder covered in bright yellow. A posse of gold finches had found it! At one point a pair (one male and one female) of purple finches was mixed among the gold.
Photographing gold finches was impossible. They were either on the feeder (which does not make for nice photographs) or buried deep among the branches of hemlock which neighbors the feeder; chickadees are the same. I may have to try adding a bare branch perch nearby or moving the feeder to another spot.
In addition to the finches, there seemed to be more chipping sparrows that the week before and the white-throated sparrows arrived. There were still numerous chickadees and juncos around as I expect there will be all summer.
During our walk on Saturday (in which we circumnavigated the beaver swamp that abuts our property) we noticed the appearance of fiddle-head ferns in a boggy area. The light was not great for photographs but I headed out the next morning with macro lens on the camera in search of more fiddle-heads and possibly other emergent ferns; the fiddle-heads were most common, by far.
Both days, I kept careful watch for the first odonates while I wandered, but none were yet to be found. Soon!
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