If you're on Facebook or you know someone who is, please consider supporting our favorite wildlife rehabber, Flint Creek Wildlife Rehabilitation, with a vote in the Chase Community Giving Campaign. Flint Creek Wildlife Rehabilitation is a private, not-for-profit organization in the Chicago area treating over 3,400 animals annually! The vote is completely free and gives Flint Creek the chance to get funding from $25,000 to $250,000, depending on where they end up in the final vote. Voting just takes a moment! Visit the Chase Community Giving application and vote for FCWR!
Flint Creek recently released a pair of orphaned Bald Eagles back to the wild after raising them to independence so be sure to check out their Facebook page and look for photos of that fantastic event. Some of you may know that we (Arthur and Amy) volunteered with FCWR and that this all-volunteer wildlife rescue organization means a lot to both of us. Your support would be greatly appreciated and remember, it doesn't cost anything! Please vote if you're on Facebook and share the word with your family and friends, too. Voting ends November 22nd. For more information about Flint Creek check out their website or Facebook page. Thank you!
We've been getting more and more birds at our backyard feeders since we moved here in February. Yesterday morning we were delighted to see our first Baltimore Oriole!! He was hanging around all day and he's back today singing his heart out in our backyard. He's probably trying to find a mate to show off our awesome grape jelly that he found. ;) Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to get a good picture of this beautiful bird at our feeder, but it looks something like this:
We recently moved into a new home in a village north of Chicago (before this we lived in the Netherlands). One of the first things we did after moving in was set up some bird feeders in our backyard. The area we live in is quite urban and in the first two weeks we didn't see many birds at all, except for some crows and starlings flying by. That changed a week ago when a beautiful male Northern Cardinal was hanging out in the trees behind our fence. He was looking at the feeders, but they were actually not suitable (too small) for a cardinal. We had bought some bigger feeders a couple of days earlier but the ground was too hard to put them in. Shortly after that I saw some Dark-eyed Juncos (slate-colored) flying around, but again they weren't landing on the feeders. Then a little bit later we suddenly saw an American Goldfinch chowing down on seeds. Yah, that was our very first backyard bird here in our new home. :)
In the past week a lot of juncos have been coming and going. They are so cute, hopping around the ground looking for seeds. Unlike many other birds, the juncos prefer to eat on the ground. They don't care about all the fancy feeder equipment we bought and prefer to hop around below them. At the beginning they were very hesitant to go anywhere near our feeders and a few always kept watch from the trees as one was eating, but now the juncos are getting more comfortable and they are staying around for a while.
Today we had a new visitor to our yard, a Black-capped Chickadee. Two, actually! I know it's no big deal to get these juncos, goldfinches and chickadees in your backyard, but we're quite excited to finally have some after not seeing any for a couple of weeks. We're hoping that these guys will tell all their friends and we'll soon have lots of birds at our feeders. Which birds do you get in your backyard?
In the last few weeks we've been seeing a Rose-ringed Parakeet in our backyard here in the Netherlands. These birds are originally from tropical Africa and India but have established feral populations in a number of cities around the world, including London and some big Dutch cities. We hear them fly by our house quite often and sometimes we see them sitting high up in trees in our neighborhood. This was the best view we had of one since we saw them in India:
Here’s a picture of a young one that we saw behind the Taj Mahal in Agra when we visited India in 2006. It was so small it still had to grow into its ring:
The Rose-ringed Parakeet was one of the first parakeets we made into a Birdorable, because we had seen them on our holiday in India. Here's the Birdorable version of this adorable bird:
And this is us at the Taj Mahal. One of the most beautiful places I have ever visited:
