New California Wildlife: Birds

So, while there is a slight delay with pics (and stories) from recent vacation, I thought I can entertain you with few words about New California's wild birds we were able to lure to our back yard with fancy looking looking bird feeder and not less fancy bird food from Wild Birds Unlimited (I think this store won't be able to get rid off me as a customer for life).

These gold little dudes and their female versions (who look less gold, but are still quite cute) found our bird feeder first. Funny enough they use not only finch feeder (with special food for finches), but also feeder for bigger birds.

An absolute record for this finch feeder is 8 goldfinches at once so far, which is quite amazing since these little birdies don't like to share their food and our finch feeder is quite small. I guess finch food tastes too good to pay any attention to these facts :)

We also got a couple of north american cardinals, or may be two, I saw 2 females at feeder once, but that can be also a grown up nestling of the couple.

This is she, being proud and chilling out on the feeder branch. And at the picture bellow you can see the cardinal male, trying to get some food from angry paws of goldfinch to feed his lady :)

They really do that feeding sometimes, looks quite cute, but it is very hard to get on camera :(

White breasted nuthatches are very-very amusing birds. We saw them in our back yard even before we got bird feeder up.

Once in the morning I noticed something flying down a tree root and then running up the tree by spiral fetching out something from the tree trunk of its way. That looked so fun, that I spend some time after that trying to locate more of these birds and watching them doing it again and again.

Well, they like food from feeder as well:

I must say we have a couple more birds coming to the feeders, however they didn't learn yet how to not get scared by weird ppl, who are trying to make pictures of them, and are flying away as soon as Yuriy gets camera to his hands. But we are working on it!

Vacation

I have to apologize for 2 weeks of silence, but I do have a good excuse for it: most of the time we were out of town, in a place not that much spoiled by internet or even cellphone connection (I mean AT&T here) - Pawleys Island of South Carolina:


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Not having internet/phone connection made our vacation even more appreciated: instead of checking mail, website stats, news, facebook, google plus, twitter, etc. we were "forced" to spend time enjoying fresh air and kind sun of ocean beach, warm water, healthy seafood diet and nice company.

So now you know, why it was almost not possible to post anything during the vacation.

However today, at last free day before beginning of first working week, I will make a promise to share some interesting pictures and stories from our time off soon.

I just need to finish up with that peach madness first :) 6 last peaches to go!

New California Wildlife: Mushrooms

This is that you get if you don't do your backyard lawn during hot and humid weather for a couple of weeks. Especially if your back yard is a half-forest.

These looked to me totally like brown cap boletus. I swear I was ready to pick all 10 of them and fry with some potatoes, but Yuriy told me out of it, since we don't know mushroom kinds in this part of the globe, it is probably very easy to get wrong ones. But nothing could keep us from making couple of nice photos.

But boletuses were not the only mushrooms I found in the backyard today morning, apparently we also have something very much resembling chanterelles, they were growing aside from the boletuses, almost in the circle. Even though I can't say I am sure about eating these (still not sure if they are chanterelles), this one still looks pretty:

So, maybe I should give up my dreams about hamster farm as a backup plan and start thinking about growing eatable mushrooms... Ninja squirrels might be happy :)

Wrath of the Nature

Last monday was a busy day as any monday at the beginning of the week before vacation would be. No wonder that I didn't pay much of the attention to the weather outside: there was absolutely no time to look through windows.

It was a bit more dark outside than a day before when we left from work, but I again didn't pay much of attention to it.

It started looking suspicious when our car turned from Route 42 to New California Woods: every yard, driveway, road on the way were strewed with leaves and branches; and pavements were steaming.

We decided that some kind of heavy rain came by and we were just lucky to miss it. And only when we entered the house, we found this surprise on out top patio:

I guess, after all we got lucky.

With all these trees we have around it could have ended much worse.