Jaci Dawn

My days – when I am at home, and not at work – have been spent bird watching in my own backyard. Birds are God’s gift to me, and the little haven we have built on our 100×100′ lot has been our gift to the birds. We are surrounded by sterile yards – I try not to judge my neighbors who have different values than I do, but hey have yards without flowers, without water, and without insect life: heavily sprayed and poisoned against the influx of weeds or creeping things, they are lifeless habitats while our yard is a virtual Eden.

My computer presently holds over 400 photos shot with my DLSR (set on “sports”) that I need to meticulously go through and delete, edit, choose, and watermark. I am spending more time with my husband than on the computer, so it may be a while before I get to these photos (think cold winter months).

Tomorrow, I will haul artwork down to the yard: things that need to be sanded down before I can repaint, and things that need the use of my Dremel tool. But my DSLR will be at hand to take more photos of the birds that inhabit our yard – and which are becoming more comfortable with the presence of two human beings who pose no threat to them.

The Spotted Towhee – I like this photo because while it lacks focus and quality, it shows the speed ith which a wild bird can escape the camera’s lens. We have a nesting pair and their one fledgling in the yard. hey take no less than three baths a day!

There are the juncos, the Bewick’s wrens, the house finches, and the song sparrows. The Anna’s hummingbirds are at odds with the Rufous hummingbird over the five feeders hanging in the yard.

That’s not counting the black-capped chickadees that have decided the hummingbird feeders are also a good place to catch small insects!

There are three black-capped chickadee siblings. They’re idiots. I have a series of phots (as yet unedited) that show one sibling losing its grip on a hummingbird feeder, and ending up hanging upside down, like the fellow above.

I mentioned to my husband that all I was seeing were the siblings, and no chestnut-backed chickadees.

I have a series of photos of this little guy deciding to take a bath by hanging onto the pocked piece of granite. He’s much smaller than his black-capped cousins.

Then there’s the bushtits… I’ve seen them play in the sprinklers before, but this summer they decided to entertain us by taking a communal bath in the concrete birdbath. This is not one of the better photos – as I said, I have a lot to edit! Bushtits are tiny little grey fluff balls so non-descript that most people don’t even notice them. They are one of my favorite birds.

I call them the Three Stooges. There’s only two in the photo (obviously), but there are three of them – siblings from the crow’s nest in the Doug fir across the street from us.

It’s a good summer. A bird summer. I’ll be shooting photos and setting them aside to deal with when the weather turns cool enough to sit upstairs and edit. I haven’t started on the insects and blooms. The birds are enough.

Shalom. I’m still here.