June 2023: Juvenile Hawk, A Skipper & Egyptian Walkers
Seen while walking:
In the backyard garden:
I love Egyptian Walking onions. You can use them like scallions/green onions or you can let them dry & use just the bulbs. Note that a couple of the bulbs have sprouted new growth... in completely soilless conditions. They are, in my opinion, the best starting place for people who want to start growing their own onions because the flavor is great & the hardiness of the plant helps to keep the novice from becoming discouraged by failure. Trust me, my queen & I have been trying to grow bulbing onions for at least three years & this is the first year that we’ve started to see good results. If it wasn’t for the success of our Egyptian Walkers, we might have written our previous failures with bulbing onions off as “we just can’t grow onions here” & stopped trying to grow bulbing onions altogether. Gardening is like cooking in that it is one part science & one part art... sometimes you just have to persevere in the face of failure until the splatters of paint on the canvas begin to make sense intuitively:
(For those wondering: Odyssey is a legally-trapped juvenile red-tailed hawk held under a federal falconry permit; he is not a pet. Once the hunting season is over, he'll be released back into the wild)
(UPDATE: I initially planned to release Odyssey around spring 2023 - however, due to the fact that his flight feathers are particularly weak and brittle, he is staying with me through the summer molt so he can grow new strong healthy feathers before being released)
(UPDATE Sept 24th 2023) Odyssey has his new feathers! :-)
(UPDATE November 24th 2023) Odyssey has officially been released back into the wild! We had a great run together and it was time for him to go back to being a wild animal again. Best of luck to him!!!
Where did all the birds go?? by Debbie Meader
Via Flickr:
All of the birds that were feeding in our yard took flight or cover from the Juvenile Cooper's Hawk! The Coop landed on our railing for a brief rest on a very foggy morning. It was very queit with no birds singing or chattering, until the Coop left the area!
A rare visitor to the feeder! This red-tailed hawk must live nearby, I see it around a lot (but never this close! 😲).
For the other birds, this was business as usual as they kept on coming up to the feeders and stuffing their beaks. Likewise, this hawk obviously had better things to do as it paid the other birds no mind and eventually flew on its way...