Late this afternoon, as the sun was low, shimmering and spilling into a thin lake of gold clouds behind the tree-line, several small birds perched in the tops of trees to catch the last rays of light. It was cold and clear, after a day that began with a heavy frost and stayed cold all day. Three House Finches, a Bluebird and a Phoebe all glowed in deceptively rich shades of rose, red and yellow in separate treetops. And one solitary Robin looked especially bright, with its feathers fluffed out and burning a fiery rust-red at the top of a big water oak with a shaggy brown stubble of remaining leaves, on the crest of a hill.<\/p>\n
I was standing just below the tree, looking up and admiring the Robin, when suddenly it called chirp-chuck-chuck-cheep!<\/span> and flew \u2013 and a Cooper\u2019s Hawk swooped over, wings outspread, and glided swiftly across the street and into a thick line of trees. This particular corner is a spot where I\u2019ve often seen a Cooper\u2019s Hawk, so I think one is spending the fall and winter season in this area again this year, where there are nearby woods and a creek, as well as open grassy yards and shrubs with lots of small and medium-sized yard birds.<\/p>\n It was a brief sighting, but the size and sturdy shape of the hawk \u2013 its barred breast and long, banded tail, and the way it held its wings and turned as it flew \u2013 left an image that lingered like a photo. And it came at a nice time, because I was just feeling kind of discouraged about how little bird activity I\u2019ve seen the past few days around here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Late this afternoon, as the sun was low, shimmering and spilling into a thin lake of gold clouds behind the tree-line, several small birds perched in the tops of trees to catch the last rays of light. It was cold and clear, after a day that began with a heavy frost and stayed cold all […]<\/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\/226"}],"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=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}