Nature Pics

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[RoseMorninStar]

Lovely! I'm waiting for the flowers to come up here. So far only the crocuses. We had an inch of ice on the birdbath yesterday.

[RoseMorninStar]

Because of everything else going on.. I just wanted to post a picture of something lovely. I don't know if it technically qualifies as nature.. my orchid bloomed and it's almost done but lovely none-the-less.

[Inanna]

It’s beautiful

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Beautiful. Why would that not qualify as nature?

[RoseMorninStar]

Beautiful. Why would that not qualify as nature?

Thank you.

Because it's indoors/not a 'natural' environment?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

It's nature as far as I am concerned.

Here is today's friend


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[RoseMorninStar]

Nice! He's a big boy. Is that a mule deer?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Yup.

[Frelga]

I think it's what we got, too. Loads of them.

One was trotting along the street yesterday. Behind it was a car driving slowly, in case the deer bolted into the road. Except the deer was waiting for the car to pass so it could cross to the other side and get into the yard with the tasty grass. It finally crossed carefully while the car waited.

[RoseMorninStar]

While I enjoy looking at wildlife/deer, they can be problematic. My daughter was stopped at a stop sign when a deer decided her car was a threat. Are mule deer the same? Can they get aggressive in the fall?

Edited: removed photo of car because I thought perhaps it wasn't fitting for this thread.

[Frelga]

Rose, yikes, that's a lot of damage. And I bet the deer didn't have insurance.

I haven't seen them be anything but indifferent to humans. I know hitting a deer while driving on a highway is dangerous, but never heard of one attacking a car.

There's elk over at Point Reyes, they may be a different story.

[RoseMorninStar]

We haven't seen Indigo buntings in several years, but this year we have a pair in the yard (for now anyway). They are skittish and we've been trying to get a photo, but our daughter got a photo of some in their yard. Their little fountain/pond attracts all sorts of wildlife.

[Jude]

Wow! What beautiful birds! I don't think we have any blue-coloured birds around here.

[Frelga]

We get Steller's jay. It's pretty blue, but not this blue.

I keep trying to catch one bird on camera so I can figure out what it is. It won't sit still. It's smaller and more streamlined than the scrub jays, the color of the mourning doves but not as fluffy and with longer tail, and the underneath of wings and tail are white with dark bars. And it harasses the crows.

I think it may be a Northern mockingbird. We have, like, 2K of them.

[RoseMorninStar]

We have a regular Blue Jay, and we occasionally see Eastern blue birds, and the Indigo buntings. There are also Great blue herons but they are a softer greyish-blue. We used to get a lot of tree swallows which are black-blue/iridescent but the blue can be hard to see.

Jude, you don't have Blue jays where you live?

[Inanna]

Those are really pretty birds!

[Jude]

Oh yeah, I forgot about blue jays! I don't see them very often, but they're quite attractive when they do appear.

[RoseMorninStar]

Put out peanuts and the jays will come in abundance.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

We have many Stellar Blue Jays. They are beautiful, though their call can be grating at times. I have learned, however, that some of the cries that I thought were our local red shouldered hawks are actually the blue jays mimicking the hawk's calls as a defense mechanism. That's pretty cool.