Sunday, March 11, 2012

Birds And Butterflies



Richard and I love birds! We try to identify all of them that we are able to see. (It's hard in bright sunlight and they fly away, of course!)  This is a bird called a killdeer and we have observed a pair of them on the very top of Arabia Mountain.  They look very much like a bird at the seashore, with their long legs and the way that they fly.  Their cries sound like "KILL-DEER". My  Daddy calls them "Kill-dees", but of course, it is the same bird.  They lay their eggs on open ground, amongst pebbles just out in the open.  If you go too near to the eggs, one will pretend that it has an injured wing to distract you from their eggs... Audrey from www.audreygoeslocal.blogspot.com saw one of these recently.  Audrey, here is the photo of the kildeer that we saw on Arabia Mountain!
 We have an extremly valuable item to put water in for our birds.  It is a plastic saucer for a flower pot!
Let you tell you though, this is like a treasure for our birds.  You cannot believe how popular this is, especially in our hot Georgia summers.  This is a tufted titmouse and we just call it a "tufty". 
 This is a male cardinal and will look even brighter than this once our winter is past.   The cardinal is one of the last birds in the evening to come down to our patio for food or water.
 We saw this butterfly at the trail at Arabia Mountain today.  We don't know what it is yet, but we will find out!  The pattern on the wings reminds me of a guitar.  Notice that the diamorpha in the background is beginning to have white buds, will be flowering very soon now.
 Richard got a better close up of this bird but then, it was out of focus!  It is a brown headed nuthatch and it had really been tap, tap, tapping on this tree!  I put this on here so you can see the blue sky!






 Another butterfly from Arabia Mountain above and a carolina wren that was also on our patio.  Sorry that isn't a very good photo of it, but it is such a quick little bird, with that little tail that flicks up and down, and it is such a nice shade of brown too.  It will make a nest in some odd places, such as a mailbox, a wreath on your door, or a bag of nails hanging up in a shed.  They are dear little birds and many people are thrilled if they choose to nest near your homes.  They have a beautiful song.
This is a mockingbird which was from our walk at Alexander Lake at Panola Mountain. Besides mocking other birds, they also have lovely white bars on their wings which you can see when they fly or when they are resting like this. They will often spread their wings out very widely and then back again...they think birds do this perhaps to get rid of insects. I think they might do so just because it feels good to stretch in that nice sunshine.


 An American robin.  Please notice that it is very different from the robins in England.  It is from the thrush family and is much more like an English blackbird.  (I love robins, both English and American.)   This is a female robin. On the male, the dark feathers will be darker and the orangey bit just a bit more brighter.

Oh look, Richard has given me the camera! We walked this trail today.  At Arabia Mountain, it is the one mile rock trail that goes down to the lake which we have not photographed before.  I will show you photos of that but it will have to wait until the next post.  Our time changed this weekend, it's such a shame to lose an hour when every minute is so important! Never mind, we'll get it back in the autumn.  Hope everyone enjoys birds and butterflies as much as we do!

26 comments:

  1. Once again, a very interesting post with great pictures to go with it, and the perfect company for my morning coffee :-)

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    1. Dear Meike,
      Just wait until you see the photos that Richard took with our new camera yesterday at Arabia, that post will knock your socks off! :-)

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  2. How lovely to be able to take a look at the birds & other wildlife (including Richard!!) that you see on your walks...fascinating. You're right, the robin is so different from our small,red breasted little bird. It reminds me of Australian magpies which are black & white but otherwise bear no resemblance to ours at all! I always feel a little wistful, thinking of early colonisers who must have felt so homesick & named the birds after the familiar ones 'back home' because the colours were similar! Anyway, thanks for the lovely post, Kay. Have a great week xo

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    1. Dear Rachel,
      Ha, ha on Richard being wildlife!

      Just think how homesick they must have been to call that bird a robin simply due to the color, it is such a different bird! One of my favorite books as a child was "The Secret Garden" and I thought the drawing of the robin was just somebody who didn't know what a robin looked like!
      You have a great week too!

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  3. Hi Kay ~ I love all of your photos but was very excited to see "your" killdeer. They are really lovely birds. Thanks for helping me to identify the one I saw here in Charlotte. I'm going to really be on the lookout for those now. I also love butterflies and always see some spectacular ones when we vacation on Hilton Head. (some photos here:http://www.audreygoeslocal.blogspot.com/2011/09/pinckney-island-national-wildlife.html). Happy Monday!

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    1. Dear Audrey,
      Yay for the kildeer! My brother has a pair that has eggs every year in the gravelly drive to his barn and must be careful not to run over them. So far, so good!
      I will look at your butterfly photos! I love them too!
      Happy Monday to you!

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  4. Beautiful photos, Kay, and a lovely post. Butterflies and birds are one of my favourite things about spring. The outdoors is starting to wake up over here. The weather was gorgeous yesterday and there was a lot of critter activity in our backyard. The birds are starting to return from their southern vacations and I look forward to them hanging around in my garden. Can't wait for the butterflies, bees, dragonflies, etc, to emerge! Have a great day.

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    1. Dear Martha,
      Our robins are here year round, but most people don't believe me when I tell them that, they have read so many times of people being excited (in the North) when they see the first robin in the Spring. (Of course, the robins are more active here in the Spring.) They are not very good fliers and you really need to be careful of them if they fly in front of your car.
      Can't wait to see all your great gardening photos!

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  5. Enjoyed your bird pictures, interesting to see what's in the upstate here. My husband says the butterfly is a Painted Lady.

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    1. Hey, look at Scriptor's comment below. I am about to put that name "Vanessa virginiensis" into a search engine. Happy you enjoy birds and butterflies too. Hopefully, we will get better at taking up close shots!

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  6. Great pics :) As the years go by I find myself grow more and more fascinated by birds. They are darling creatures and the world would be a stale, empty rock without them.

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    1. Dear Jane!
      Thanks! Richard took all these photos except two... I took the photo of the kildeer and the one of Richard, of course!
      I love birds! Even if you don't feed them, if you put out water you will see lots of birds!

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  7. The Kildeer is very like (and presumably closely related to) our Ringed Plover - which is a shore bird and also does that injured wing trick.

    The first butterfly is an American Lady (Vanessa virginiensis), a close relative of the Painted Lady we get in this country. The second is a Buckeye again.

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    1. Richard thought that first one looked like a painted lady, but I love the name "American Lady"!
      Oh, I should have known that was a Buckeye! But I didn't see it myself, I was marching on ahead like I always do, can't wait to see what is around the next corner, and Richard hangs back taking photos!
      Thank you for knowing these butterflies and telling me what they are!
      When I lived in England, I was fascinated with the similarites between the English birds and the American birds rather than the differences.

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  8. I love kildeer! I usually have one or two around my house in season. I feed the birds and put out water when it stops freezing (about now). A few weeks ago, at the first false signs of spring, I had dozens of robins in my yard. Washtucna is sort of a bird fly-way.

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    1. Hey!
      We love the killdeer too! We mostly see them down at my Daddy's since he has a big pasture and they are always there. We have robins year round here. We do have birds that just come through here, a rose breasted grosbeak comes to mind, very excited to see it at my feeder only the one time. Have you ever heard of a GOOD GOD bird? It is a woodpecker that is believed to be extinct now, but when people would see it, they would actually say, "Good God". It was that kind of amazement.

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  9. The first butterfly looks like perhaps a sort of checkerspot, but my specific entomological identification skills are limited to the north I'm afraid.

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    1. Hey!
      So happy to hear from you again! I really love butterflies but my knowledge of them is very limited.
      (Much like all of my knowledge but my wisdom knows no bounds!)
      Please visit again!

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  10. Nice pictures. I always like cardinals, I expect they are called that because of their red coats. Do they have human cardinals in the US? and if they do, do they have red coats?

    The butterflies are lovely. And the robin, which looks to be larger than an English robin. Actually a little robin (English) came and sat by me when I was gardening today. They like to hang around gardeners because I think we must turn up worms for them. I don't know why other birds haven't figured that out.

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    1. Dear Jenny,
      Oh yes, that is really what the cardinal bird is named after, the bright red that the cardinals wear in the Catholic church. It is such a beautiful bird and the female is just as pretty, just not as colorful.

      I love the English robin! Such a character! Such a song! Of course you must love the book "The Secret Garden" as much as I do! You must remember the little robin in that story, that was my first experience with the robin in England, I thought that the person who did the drawing in that book just couldn't be bothered to draw a robin the right way!

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  11. Hello Kay, thank you your comments. I'm always learning something about birds. You seemed to have captured great moments of the outdoors. Those mocking birds always confuse me with their immitations. Have a great day.

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    1. Hey, I missed you comment yesterday! Sorry! (Too tired after work, I guess!)
      I love the mockingbirds! They like to fly to the highest point, put their heads back and sing...well, like a bird!

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  12. Hey, Kay. Just found your blog, and I love it! I am a Georgia girl...born in Jackson Georgia, then lived in Dekalb County for years. Like you, I love my tea..sweet iced tea, or hot with milk and sugar! I am a new follower. I love your bird photos. Patsy

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  13. Dear Patsy, Oh, how nice to meet you! And we hope our bird photos will get better, it is a new camera, you see...we are getting used to it!
    Thanks for being a new follower!
    Love,
    Kay We like our tea the same way too!

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  14. Wow you really captured some beautiful photos of those birds and butterflies. They never sit still for me. It's either that or I'm just not stealthy enough... as my son says.

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    1. Ha, I know just what you mean. Most of mine are just the backs of birds flying away, or a flower that just had a butterfly resting upon it!
      I took the first photo of the killdeer, all the rest are by Richard! We are just not stealthy enough, that's it exactly!

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