So Far, So Good

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On Sunday I spent a couple of hours birding the Little Cypress Creek Preserve at the junction of Telge and Spring Cypress, just a few hundred yards from our house.

It was busy with birds, including many Yellow-rumped Warblers.

The best sighting was a brief glimpse of an Eastern Towhee, a new life bird for me. Unfortunately, I never managed to get a photo of it. 

It was back to work on Monday but there was time for me on both days to look around the campus, where the most exciting event was the arrival of 80 Ring-necked Ducks on the southern retention pond. Later in the week the ducks were joined by an American Redhead, two Lesser Scaup and a pair of American Coots.

Our yards have been busy, too, although no new birds have turned up. American Goldfinches continue to hog the sock  and tube feeders so that it's often hard for our Carolina Chickadees and House Finches to find a place to eat.

White-winged  Doves have been turning up by the dozen, while the Red-bellied and Downy Woodpeckers and Northern Mockingbird have had to share the suet feeders with an Orange-crowned Warbler, a Pine Warbler, a Yellow-rumped Warbler and a Ruby-crowned Kinglet. 

Ruby-crowned Kinglet

Our resident pair of Carolina Wrens were looking for a nesting site yesterday. They checked out a nesting box on our shed but it looked as though the female rejected it. I'm hoping they'll end up choosing to nest in one of our hanging baskets.

Talking of our shed, Dee has had several good looks at the rat family which lives underneath it. The other day she watched as the two adults brought their two offspring out to eat sunflower seeds that had fallen from our feeders.

BTW, by the end of Wednesday my 2011 bird list had reached 72 species.
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