A little further up the road, a good many birds were scattered out in another yard \u2013 more Robins, Chipping Sparrows, Bluebirds, Yellow-rumped Warblers, a couple of Starlings \u2013 and one very fine male Rusty Blackbird with yellow eyes and picture-perfect black plumage with a rippled shadow of rusty-brown across the shoulders and back.<\/p>\n
A Northern Flicker called kleer!<\/em> from the woods. A Pine Warbler trilled its song. Two Brown-headed Nuthatches chattered squeakily in some pines. A flock of Cedar Waxwings flew over, scattering their high, thin calls like rain. Several Yellow-rumped Warblers flew from limb to limb in the trees, calling check<\/em> as they flew. One handsome male Yellow-bellied Sapsucker worked quietly on the trunk of a pecan tree.<\/p>\n Clouds had moved in and begun to cover most of the sky as I came to the summit of a hill, with wooded yards on both sides and a power cut beyond the back yards on one side of the road. A fluctuating nasal call came from the edge of the woods not far away, a long, repeated ahn-ahn-ahn-ahn-ahn-ahn<\/em>. I knew it was a White-breasted Nuthatch, but it wasn\u2019t until I looked it up later that I realized it wasn\u2019t a call really, but the song<\/em> of a White-breasted Nuthatch.<\/p>\n Along the roadside, bluets, purple henbit and yellow dandelions were all in bloom, and in one lush dandelion flower, a honeybee combed through the petals. Because honeybees face such serious threats, their populations shrinking and in peril, I\u2019ve begun to feel it as a small sign of hope whenever I see one, and it\u2019s strange \u2013 something that used to be so common, but we can no longer take for granted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A little further up the road, a good many birds were scattered out in another yard \u2013 more Robins, Chipping Sparrows, Bluebirds, Yellow-rumped Warblers, a couple of Starlings \u2013 and one very fine male Rusty Blackbird with yellow eyes and picture-perfect black plumage with a rippled shadow of rusty-brown across the shoulders and back. A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1141"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1141"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1143,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1141\/revisions\/1143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}