Zooming - September 2014

Late summer and early fall is a time of transition…lots of changes to capture in photos. There are seed pods

And seeds.

Insects going about the business of feeding,

Mating and growing large enough to move to the phase of their life to overwinter.

The birds are through their nesting and getting ready for migration. There was a bright yellow mold that emerged from a knot in our deck railing after a rain.

And - last but not least in this collection of zoomed images - the bright colors of flowers and chard stems.

Complaining Robin

There is a robin that flies to the sycamore beside my deck and complains with the same style vocalizations every time I walk out onto the deck. I think its nest is underneath the deck. Why is it so alarmed? On the positive side - it is easy to get pictures of the bird while it vocally defends its turf!

Now that I’ve viewed the pictures on my larger monitor - it is easy to see that it is a female. She is quite insistent about keeping me away from her nest. I supposed she feels like there is an earthquake when I walk on the deck since her nest is on one of the support beams. But why is it that the nest is so important in August? Surely it is past the time for a new clutch of eggs and young.

And the bird seems to recognize me. It makes eye contact. If I stay out long enough it flies to the maple and continues to stare even if the vocalization stops after a few minutes.  And then I go back inside and the robin - apparently - has what it wants.

Robins’ Nests

Almost every year a robin nests on the cross beam that supports our deck. Our two cats look down through the deck boards from the half of the deck that is covered - with keen interest but unable to disturb the nest at all.

This year we have 5 nests! Maybe the second and fourth one look a little scruffy - might be left over from last year. But that still leaves 3 that look freshly constructed. The fifth one is the one is on the corner of the deck nearest the garden…so the robin frequently leaves in a hurry and noisy complaint whenever I am gardening.

We are quite a few robins in our neighborhood. The trees in the yards are now 20+ years old and the trees in the forest that extended down to the river behind the neighborhood has trees that are older still. The robins seem to increase in number every year but this is the first time I’ve seen the increase so tangibly: more nests means more robins in the next generation!

Robins!

Robins on the lawn or in the garden are another sign of spring. The ones I’ve seen recently appear to be tolerating the last blast of winter quite well. Even without their feathers fluffed they look well fed! The robins pictured in this post seemed almos tame....alowing me to walk relatively close (and then use the camera's zooom) to get their pictures.

We always seem to have the most robins in the spring. They seem to move around in small flocks and then we see them one at a time or in pairs later in the season. Perhaps some of them head further north and a few stick around to nest in our area. Almost every summer we have a nest under our deck.