Nature Notes: early February

I'm going to begin with three shots of the birds snacking on my deck wall.

The first shot is of a rufous-sided towhee and the second shot is of a carolina chickadee with a towhee at the bottom.

 I think the posture of the male cardinal below looks like a fish and there's a junco beside him.

When I walk in my neighborhood I always see a downy woodpecker at the same suet cage.

The same house has two suet cages and numerous bird feeders but this particular cage is the province of the downy woodpecker.

 I also spotted the squirrel below on a neighborhood walk.

 I think the bird below is a raven.

 The next shot is another day and includes both suet cages and bird feeders at the neighbor house.

 In the shot above the downy woodpecker is on the far right suet cage and below I zoomed in.

 I could photograph this bird all day.

 The carolina chickadee below is finding seeds to eat in the crepe myrtle tree.

 The next three shots were taken at the Prairie Ridge Ecostation.

My Our World post this week is about the ecostation and you can click here if you are interested.

 As we walked by, flocks of birds would emerge from the grasses but I didn't get any good bird shots.

 The rest of the shots were taken during a walk on the Crabtree Creek trail.

 This trail is on the other side of the road from the Shelley Lake trail I frequently walk on.

Runners frequently continue on this trail after running on the Shelley Lake portion.

Back when I jogged I hoped to get to the point where I could jog that far but health issues made me stop jogging. There is a 26 mile loop which includes a number of these connected greenway trails which marathon runners use.

If I want to walk on this trail I drive and park where it begins because by the time I would get there walking from home on the greenway trails near my house; just turning around at the start point and walking back to my house would be a long walk for me.

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