Wild Light

Earlier a sonnet, and now a nervy cardinal races toward the weekend.

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See a spring pause.

From reader and correspondent Timothy Ladd, a sonnet.

——— Wild Notes ———

The charming cardinal is our year-round friend,
Warbling wild notes unnoticed in the pines,
While other gaudy plumes will have us spend
Our greater powers on their rarer signs.
Content yourselves with easy arcs of swallows,
Twittering till the shallow end of day.
The jay will startle. Every starling follows
Raucously its twin. House sparrows say
Their feeble thoughts in hordes so loud
It drives the finch away. And we, bereft,
Hear feathers of a nightingale in cloud
Overhead, find down an eagle must have left,
And disregard all glory we have heard
Come streaming from that scarlet bird.

Saturday was the Royal Oak Nature Society’s 2008 Open House at Tenhave Woods and despite the cool and sometimes rainy conditions I managed to crawl on my belly like a reptile to find this ant traversing a serrated leaf edge.

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See an ant in a sea of gold.

Tiny yellow bundles of energy, two male goldfinches shout avian obscenities midair.

Not a good photograph, but it gives an idea of their Lilliputian passion.

See two birds collide.

A fierce aerial battle between two feisty starlings, they always seem to recover with no apparent harm after these tiffs.

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See an avian mini-Olympics.

A startled Grackle slices through the air on a cold March evening.

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See a late-afternoon aerial argument.

Spring is finally looking up here in southeast Michigan, and this little finch seems to agree.

See a rare example of avian Phrenology.

Cue Sinatra.

This pair of finches has been hanging around for a little while, the male is pretty feisty.

Captions are welcome.

Stirring the wind, fearless and willful, frozen in flight.

Some areas of the lower sparrow’s wings have been worn raw, a hard life I’m sure.

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We’re snowbound again, a wintry spring start. See two sparrows battling the winter wind.

A nicely marked female House Finch attacks the wind.

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See a cardinal on the rise.

From earlier in this never-ending winter, a female cardinal tries some not-so friendly persuasion on a sparrow during a seed dispute.

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See an event from the Avian Olympics.