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
I repurposed the hanging chick feeder I made in 2019 to feed the wild birds. I do not plan on raising chicks again, and I do enjoy watching the birds come visit.
Critters and Craft 