Here We Go Again

We had a gorgeous day for the CBC on Monday. Cle Elum was snow-free when we arrived on Sunday, but 2-4 inches fell overnight and until around 9am, so when we set out on count day it was pristine and beautiful. Temperatures hovered around freezing the whole day, so it wasn't too cold either.

( Scenery and birds )

We've been back a week and it's photo post time! Not that there are too many land photos, since we spent most of the trip getting wet, but this is the summary:

( Little Cayman and Grand Cayman )

I haven't often seen California quail up a tree, but that's where they ended up yesterday morning.

( Oh, no, the squirrels are after us! )

On a completely different subject, I find myself feeling surprisingly positive about the new Lib-Con coalition. There's a great deal of sense in the coalition document, and everyone's in tune about the important things (reducing the godawful debt, removing those nasty, intrusive spying laws, and we're going to get preferential voting, yay!). Europe is basically a non-issue for the next few years, with the euro in such a precarious state, and that's definitely something they can argue about later, once they've done the bigger deals. If they can both hold in check the eejits in their parties (and there are rather more Tory eejits, as an inevitable consequence of the fact that there are rather more Tories), I really think they can pull this off. I certainly hope so.

Whether they do or not, at least the political blogs and columns have been a source of a great deal more amusement over the last few days than they have in years XD Though I do wish they would stop slashing the politicians, my brain doesn't need it.

Saturday was my last day of work as an employee, yay! I am now purely an independent contractor, and I can work when I please :-)

So naturally, I drove over to Cle Elum on Sunday for the Christmas Bird Count today. I find when getting up at 4.30am, staying the night before is preferable. It started to snow not long after I started the drive, and I arrived in town with a bare dusting of snow over the pavements (two years ago in the same week, there were four foot snowbanks lining the road from the ploughing). It turned into a windless evening with huge snowflakes falling fast, and it was just gorgeous. Today we got to look for birds, tramping through 4-5 inches of pristine, perfect powder snow. It was a little windy and still snowing until around 9.30, but after that it was still and dry and crisp with gorgeous, untouched snow, and it was a fabulous day to be out. I cannot recommend enough a stroll in the winter canyons with raptors soaring everywhere :-) Bird of the day was our delightfully posed golden eagle, with all his glowing feathers sticking out from the back of his head.

Of course, all that stunning, fluffy white stuff lost some of its appeal when I had to drive back over the pass this evening, sharing the road with a number of complete dickwits. But still worth it!

I bring the hummingbird feeder in at night during icy weather, so it doesn't freeze, then put it out at first light. My feeder has a perch on it, so the birds don't have to burn calories hovering to feed, they can just sit while they suck in sugar water. I put one of those handwarmer thingies on the bottom so it doesn't freeze during the day.

Which means today, I crawled out of bed at 7.25 the morning after work's Christmas thingie, and into a dressing gown and boots to tramp through the snow and hang the hummingbird feeder at first light. I hung it on the hook and started sticking the handwarmer to it, when there was a buzz and a flash from my left. I'm used to being strafed by little fighter birds when I play with the feeder - they can get very aggressive and territorial, so that was nothing unusual.

But this time the Anna's hummingbird landed on the feeder I was still holding in my hands, and started sucking sugar six inches in front of my eyes. The whole length of her beak disappeared into the fake plastic flower, while she watched me with her right eye, black and beady below her tiny white eyebrow fleck.

I froze.

Every feather on her body was puffed up in full hairy detail, her abdomen pulsing as she lapped and swallowed. She pulled her beak out, cocked her head at me for a few moments, then went right back to sucking.

I slowly took my hands off the feeder, and backed away, thinking she'd fly at the first crucnch of snow. But she stayed, and I went back inside, and back to bed.

The poor thing must have been so hungry, to be desperate enough to come for food in the hands of a human.

I really don't mind getting out of bed at dawn on a Sunday to feed the birds.

In 2007, I saw 315 different species of birds, of which 284 were in Washington State (the only ones that really count), another 9 in the rest of North America, plus an extra 22 I fell over on my brief trip to England.

( For myself, and the one person on my f-list who will actually be interested enough to read it )

The last bird of the year was the Harris's Sparrow on December 14th in West Edison. December 14th is ridiculously early for a last bird of the year, since when I've looked for swamp sparrow (three times), chukar, grey partridge (see? It's those gamebirds again) and rosy-crowned finches, and they haven't obliged. The last Washington birds of the year were the eight short-eared owls floating about the Samish flats at the West 90 at 3.30pm on December 31st, replacing my sightings just over the border in BC. I'd looked for them in that same spot before, and there hadn't been any.

The West 90 is Birding Central for birds of prey, and it was an absolutely glorious afternoon, cloudless with the low sun over the golden, flooded fields, ringed by snow-covered mountains. I was standing in a single spot, watching a bald eagle having an altercation with three owls, the same eagle later disagreeing with a rough-legged hawk, and the ubiquitous red-tailed hawks and northern harriers cruising by. The low sun highlighted all the birds' colours and painted them with a few extras - even the bush full of streaky brown female red-winged blackbirds looked to be full of exotic yellow orioles, the effect was so dramatic. Not a bad way to finish the daylight hours of the year.

( Where the Owls Are )

On other fronts, I managed to get only one fic out in 2007, all 8,750 words of it. To make that look a little less patheitc, I'm 48,800 words into my current WIP out of a likely 60-65k total, of which 37,300 are actually consecutive from the start. (I've also got 2,000 words of the fic after that - did I mention I never write in order?) The writing lost a lot of time to the birds this year, but my intention is to really push that fic now, and hopefully get it finished and beta-ready within a couple of months. Damn, I want to to see it done so badly, because that will finally tie up my novel-length Mexico arc. And I sure as hell never thought I'd write a novel....