This little dark eyed junco bashed into our window, leaving it a little stunned. Normally I would leave them alone, but it was on the metal trash can in sub freezing temperatures.
I grabbed a shoe box, gently put the bird in, and brought it inside to rest.
After about 20 minutes, the birds started to rustle around in the box and I took the box back outside and opened it up. A very irritated bird flew out and into the trees.
The trail cam pictures gave a good way to compare the size of the new raccoon vs a cat.
These two photos were also taken just under two hours apart, so the depth of the ice is the same.
The ice accumulation from the last storm did finally all go away. I can’t recall that I’ve ever seen it stay as long as it did in Texas. I still refuse to call it snow.
In the snowy landscape of the last storm, the trail cam picked up the image of a raccoon.
Raccoon spottings have been few and far between.
As we sat iced in and watched the birds eat seeds, I took pictures. I managed to get shots of most of the menagerie. The iNaturalist app helped me with identification.
I did not get photos of the titmouse, or the blue jay, or the crows. The jays and crows kept their distance, but the titmouse were all over the feeder, so there wasn’t really a reason they did not make the roll.
One of the entertainments during the cold lockdown was watching the birds on the back porch. I threw seeds out onto the snow (haha, “snow”, it was solid ice), and we watched from our kitchen table. I saw one unusually colored bird and snapped some photos. SamBiology on iNaturalist figures it is a piebald dark eyed junco. Neat.
Piebald: having irregular patches of black and white.
“Piebaldism is a genetic condition caused by the improper migration of melanocytes during development. As a result, birds develop irregular, unpigmented (white) patches on their feathers or skin, while the rest of their body retains its normal pigmentation.” – Nature’s Way Birds
Critters and Craft 