Winter Arrives..........

As soon as the temperatures fell yesterday the feeder became very busy.  Today with the addition of fresh bird food, the crowd just keeps landing on the feeder. I don't see house finches very often at the feeder but this one was very hungry today.  The  cardinal seems to be the only cardinal to feed here as the male cardinal doesn't seem to be around anymore. The cardinal crashed into my dining room window this morning and it seems ok here.  I don't know why it would do that but it did concerned me.

I just took a photo of a female cardinal and she is all brown with a little red under here wings.  I hope I have not called the male in my past blogs , in his winter color of feathers as shown above, a female because of my older person confusion.  My bird book doesn't tell me much so I will have to get on the net and try to renew the memory that the male does go brown a little bit in the winter. I did notice that the female is a lot smaller than the male and I think I did use to know that too.

 This morning as the birds arrived I could see a lot of posturing for a place at the feeder.  The chickadee goes to battle to keep this junco away from the feeder.  It is an action photo for sure and the neighbors gas meter doesn't make for a great background to the shot.

Birds that we don't see all summer are nuthatches and downy woodpeckers. The nuthatch is too hyper for me to get a photo but I will get it done eventually.  I did see a redbellied woodpecker out there yesterday but I won't see it any more until I get some suet.

The neighbor's white cat was let outside for a while yesterday and she roamed the backyard while I was blogging.  She seems to be too white and fuzzy to be an outside cat but she has proven from her past actions that she can climb a fence or a tree with the best of them.  She was out exploring with the tiger cat that has a deep voice.  The cats are coming to my wife's cat food feeder a lot as the weather turns colder.

I am home and stuck inside today as the polar vortex finally made it to our part of the state.  We had a small snow that has put white on the ground and on the roof of the house.

I worked outside late morning yesterday and into the afternoon repairing a part of the siding on the west side.  At one time in the past I had cut a hole in the wall of the house to insert an air conditioner.  Good idea and a bad idea to do it that way but I was younger and more foolish.  The hole was closed up in a haphazard way and water was coming in and rotting out siding at the bottom of the house.

I had leftover parts of siding that I used in order to replace the whole area.  It was about  a 4 foot by 6 foot area. It is amazing how good it looks after the previous fixed was such a bad thing.  While out there working I had a long sleeved shirt with no coat and the mandatory stocking hat.  It had gotten up to 65 degrees in the afternoon and it was a good time to finish up the job.  Around 3:00 the north winds started to blow and spit a little moisture at me and I had to go in and get a heavy coat to wear.  I was just finishing up putting a coat a paint on all of it when I was in a wind storm from the north.  I finished up as quickly as  I could but still had to pick up all the tools and waste wood before I could quit.  I did get chilled from all that and had to  turn up the furnace heat and warm up when I went inside.  The fix is so good to get done and it looks like it did when it was first built.

These dried up flower heads are symbolic of what the area looks like now.  With the snow added late last night, it looks just like winter.  I feels like winter and the winds keep howling.  I won't do much today inside as I am recovering from yesterday's work.

There is a woodpile that never got burned because of the high winds the last few days.  I think I will plan to burn it with the snow on the ground and then I don't have to worry about  sitting a fire in the yard or neighborhood.  I know a lot of my blogging friends are getting hit hard with winter weather.  Others are suffering with tropical breezes off the ocean. The desert heat isn't so bad this time of the year but some of you there are warm.  Wherever you live, I wish you well.  Thanks for checking in on my blog today.