blooming trees and shrubs

 Larch, magnolia, maple, and pussywillow display their springtime beauty.

Larch Larix laricina branch with green needle tufts and female flowers

Magnolia flower buds ready to open

Maple tree blossoms

French Pussywillow Salix capria

nest watching begins

Nestwatch season has begun in Minnesota and the wild wild woods.
http://nestwatch.org/

Discovered today in an evergreen tree at the edge of the woods, a nest hidden among the needles protects two lovely eggs.  We'll watch for a few days to verify what species this is.  Can you guess?

beaks

Baltimore Oriole

Close up: the beaks of Baltimore Oriole, Red-winged Blackbird, and Common Grackle.  All three of these birds are in the blackbird family (ICTERIDAE).

Orioles have a long, thick-based, pointed bill.  They love ripe fruit and will stab the closed bill into a soft fruit, then open their mouth to cut in and drink with their brush-covered tongue.

Blackbirds have a very sharp slender bill to glean seeds from weedy plants like cocklebur. Sometimes they probe at the base of aquatic plants, prying them open to get at insects hidden inside.

Grackles devour crops like corn, eat garbage, and can saw open acorns.  Their bill is long and pointed, but slightly curved down, with a hard keel on the inside of the upper mandible.

Grackle (juvenile on left)

Red-winged Blackbird

young pileated woodpeckers

 

We watched two young female Pileated Woodpeckers Dryocopus pileatus this morning.  They were hunting for bugs in grass at the edge of the woods when a neighborhood cat came along; the woodpeckers dived and swooped above it to chase the feline away.  She crept away through the shrubs while they vocalized their loud, high-pitched ‘kuk-kuk, kuk-kuk' alarm calls.  Then they resumed searching for insects in the grass and at the base of a nearby tree.  Note the strong claws that allow them to grip tree bark solidly while they probe for insects.

nest cams ready

Nest cameras are ready in the wild wild woods! This is one camera's view into a wooden nest box from the inside of the roof, looking down.

The birds are singing, defining their territories, and looking for mates.  I cleaned out three wooden nest boxes at the woods' edge, and three pvc nesting tubes in the woods.

They all look as barren inside as this one but will soon be stuffed with an assortment of twigs, grasses, fur, fluff, string, and feathers for nesting.

First Bluebird

April 1, 2014.  No, not a joke.  I saw my "first" Eastern Bluebird of this spring season at the edge of the wild wild woods this morning.  What a welcome sight after the longest winter ever!