After two days of sleet, misty rain and temperatures staying just above freezing, this morning we awoke to a world of white. Snow had fallen overnight, covering the ground, the roads, piling up on the balcony railing and even blowing into drifts against the garage door, almost a foot deep in places, though mostly three or four inches. Snow continued to fall for a while, very lightly dusting down \u2013 rare and lovely for us here.<\/p>\n
Early in the morning, in tiny flakes of swirling snow, a big, plump sparrow was hopping and scratching under the bushes right outside our living room windows. Its wings and tail looked dark red-brown, and thick, blurry red-brown streaks marked its sides \u2013 a beautiful red Fox Sparrow. Its breast was very thickly streaked in rich red-brown, its belly white, and its face was patterned in dove-gray and fox-red \u2013 warm, lush colors in a snow-white setting, seen through a very light blur of snow. It turned toward me and spent a few minutes hopping to scratch up leaves and snow around the base of a cleyera bush.<\/p>\n
I could hardly believe it was right there in our own front yard, very near the windows where I stood. Fox Sparrows spend the winter here, but because they are shy and usually stay hidden in shrubby places, they\u2019re not often noticed, and it always seems special to me when I find one. I\u2019ve rarely seen one in our yard \u2013 and yet, this is the second one I\u2019ve seen in our neighborhood this winter. I watched for several minutes as it foraged right around this spot under the bushes and near the window \u2013 until it finally flew low toward the corner of the house and out of sight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After two days of sleet, misty rain and temperatures staying just above freezing, this morning we awoke to a world of white. Snow had fallen overnight, covering the ground, the roads, piling up on the balcony railing and even blowing into drifts against the garage door, almost a foot deep in places, though mostly three […]<\/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\/1931"}],"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=1931"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1934,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1931\/revisions\/1934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}