Transcendentalist that I am, I’m always watching for signs of the turning seasons. Yesterday I was walking along the Fox River here in Geneva, near the wastewater treatment plant, when I heard a dozen or more male Red-winged Blackbirds giving their familiar “konk-a-reee” song. While these are undoubtedly birds that have wintered here, that was the first time this year I have heard them singing. It’s too early for the males to be setting up breeding territories, but their songs said that spring is not all that far off now.<\/p>\n
Today I watched as a wintering Eastern Bluebird foraged along the river behind the Kane County office building. He was hawking low to the ground, flying out from a series of low perches, but I couldn’t tell if he was feeding on insects or some other invertebrates. He also spent some time feeding on Staghorn Sumac berries left over from last summer. He made a pretty picture, the rusty red of the berries matching his breast, and contrasting with his bright blue back and wings in the late afternoon sun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Transcendentalist that I am, I’m always watching for signs of the turning seasons. Yesterday I was walking along the Fox River here in Geneva, near the wastewater treatment plant, when I heard a dozen or more male Red-winged Blackbirds giving their familiar “konk-a-reee” song. While these are undoubtedly birds that have wintered here, that was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[160,159],"class_list":["post-9","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geneva-ill","tag-eastern-bluebird","tag-redwinged-blackbird"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}