I heard what I thought was a Carolina wren this morning. We have birds around all winter including (I think) Carolina wrens but they don’t really SING much until February. Cheep cheep cheep, etc. is what we hear in the winter. This morning’s wren was not in full operatic mode but it was song rather than noise. A little after this, the GG identified a Carolina wren at the back feeder so I was not wrong. Yay for me!

Later in the day, a bird with an ORANGE breast visited “my” feeder. I was wowed by the color but couldn’t identify it. So I called in the GG. It had moved around where he couldn’t see it well but he made the wild guess that it was a Baltimore oriole. We get those but apparently it is way early. I dunno. I looked it up but I am no expert. It did look somewhat similar to the iBird pic but I didn’t get a good enough look at it to even begin to match it.

I am using iBird Pro and Merlin Bird ID on my phone. I bought iBird when I had my first iPhone back in 2007 but had to resurrect my subscription to it. I got Merlin Bird ID last summer when I was hanging out on the moomindeck and heard a very unfamiliar bird. UKW and Lizard Breath pointed me to Merlin and it was some kind of cuckoo! I am still not good at identifying MOST birds via sight or song.

Late in The Commander’s life we helped her obtain an iPhone. Her friend Barb (from down the beach) had an iPhone with iBird on it and my mother commanded that she wanted “bird” too. Okay moom, you’ve got it🤣 This phone was a godsend for the most part because she learned how to TEXT in her late 80s. This was much easier than phone conversations at that point. One problem with the *phone* part of the iPhone was that the GG initially set her ringtone to match an old-fashioned telephone. Brrrinnnng! Since she still had a landline at that time, she couldn’t always figure out which phone was ringing.

I searched through my photos using the simple term “bird”. Birds are hard to photograph if you are not PATIENT (which I am not although much more so than I used to be). So I couldn’t find the right kind of bird pic. A wildlife photographer I will never be. I did find this old pic. So okay I will tell multiple stories today. I think this is my third already.

SAY6BIRD ANDHOUSE. I remember this felt board so well. It was soooo cool with letters and shapes. My kids probably would’ve liked it but you can’t save everything (and we do have The Bumper Book). I was trying to remember if I was five or six when this pic was taken but then I upped the light levels a bit and I saw a little “6” between SAY and BIRD. I’m not sure why that “6” is there but I think this was on or around my sixth birthday, which happened in January of first grade. I had reading pretty much totally decoded by then.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2024 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.