The highlight of the morning walk was a pair of Blue Grosbeaks in a tangled area of privet, kudzu and other shrubs and trees across the road from the old field. I had already passed this area and was headed home when I heard the Grosbeak sing \u2013 a rising and falling cascade of colorful notes. So I walked back down toward where it was singing, just hoping \u2013 and found two Grosbeaks very low in a small scrubby sweet gum tree entangled in a climbing kudzu vine and its leaves. The Grosbeaks were making short, flashy flights from branch to branch, chasing each other, flaring wings and tails.<\/p>\n
Behind the sweet gum tree, rose a large thicket of privet, and behind that, several pines. As I approached, both birds settled down on separate branches of the tree, both quite low, and the male began to sing again.<\/p>\n
The male was a deep shimmering blue, with rusty-orange wing bars and a big silver beak rimmed in black. Simply gorgeous. He sat on the edge of a branch, in the open, but no more than five feet from the ground, far from the top of the tree, and surrounded in shadowy leaves.<\/p>\n
A couple of feet lower than him, and over to one side, sat the female, more screened by leaves from me than the male. I could not see her well, except to see that she looked pale tawny brown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The highlight of the morning walk was a pair of Blue Grosbeaks in a tangled area of privet, kudzu and other shrubs and trees across the road from the old field. I had already passed this area and was headed home when I heard the Grosbeak sing \u2013 a rising and falling cascade of colorful […]<\/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\/1275"}],"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=1275"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1277,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275\/revisions\/1277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}