This place is for the birds...

General bird observations...

I know if you live on a farm already, you are probably like, "What is the big deal..." but we have been living in town for decades so moving out to a more rural area has opened up so many more opportunities to observe wildlife.  Of course, I could do without the voles, pocket gophers, and coyotes but you have to take the good with the bad.

There are great horned owls in the barn.  The windows have been broken out so there is easy access for them to the rafters.  They also love to hang out in the windrow of evergreen trees.  There used to be as many as 5 but now I only see a couple brave ones still hanging around.  Speaking of brave...it used to be that as soon as I left the house, they would fly out of the barn, but this day, he (or she) hung around while I even went into the barn!  It is too bad the lighting was poor but I did the best I could...beautiful birds of prey...(which of course, is more bad news for the future chicken farm...)

A couple of weeks ago, our neighbor mowed down the area to the south of our house.  It sure does look a lot different!  So, nice and open...as I was typing this, I just looked out there and saw a covey of quail running around under the apple trees.  

We always have a couple of hawks flying around but the day the pasture was mowed, I counted at least 12...

They were all looking for dinner...

I hope they can keep it up.  I saw this little guy near my compost bins...

I didn't get a video of it but there are geese that live on the pond at the dairy next door.  To the north of the house was a field of garbanzo beans.  After they were harvested, we had dozens of geese flying over our house, back and forth, to the field to eat up.  

There are also lots of magpies and other small birds that I don't know the identity of.  I like the idea of attracting small birds to the farm to help with insect control.  One of my goals for the winter month is to make some bird houses to do just that.