Friday Creature

This chubby cardinal pops by the tree outside my window here on a regular basis. The tree is a bit far away for my camera's lens, so I was pleased to get this shot.

In an effort to get more birds to visit, and to get them closer to my window, I put up a bird feeder this past week, which turned out to be more of an adventure than I expected. I never got around to getting our feeders up after we moved to this house several years ago, so I dug them out over the weekend. Unfortunately, they didn't keep very well in our damp, non-climate controlled storage room, and I had to toss most of them. So, I made the trip out to Wild Birds Unlimited and got a tube feeder with a tray on the bottom and some seed, plus some suet for the little cage that managed to survive the perils of the storage room.

The first couple of days saw a discouraging lack of activity, but this morning has brought a dramatic increase in visitors. So far today I've seen lots of chickadees and tufted titmice, a carolina wren, what I think was a nuthatch, a red-headed woodpecker, some sort of small reddish bird that didn't stick around long enough for me to get an ID, and maybe a bird or two that I'll have to look up in the book (do we get waxwings in these parts?). Now we'll see if my mad photographer skillz are up to the challenges presented by the light at this time of year...

UPDATE: a hairy wookpecker just made an appearance on my trellis and I'm not getting ANY work done this morning.

another UPDATE: the reddish bird came back and I think it's a purple finch.

CORRECTION: I'm going through and adding links for the birds, and what I thought was a red headed woodpecker was probably something else -- maybe a hairy woodpecker -- and I think what I thought was a hairy woodpecker was probably a downy woodpecker. Hopefully they'll all be back so I can figure it out for sure.