Critters including a Brave Goldfinch

My birdfeeder with camera is now improved and filmed a bird drama, which I’ll show in a moment. But first, here’s Charlie on his favorite chair.

Saturday Critters / Black and White

Charlie alternates between lounging in the chair and on the couch. He also has a dog bed on which he sits once in a while. He has a rug too, but he uses that for his toy collection.

Filtered Portrait for Caturday Art

As Lynn promised when she mounted the birdfeeder on Christmas, she returned yesterday with a friend who knows how to fix things. Huey brought a board and some tools so the feeder could be placed more effectively. 

They had barely walked in the door when a touch of snowflakes turned into a brief blizzard. This had not been forecast, so Lynn and I both checked our phones to see what the weather report said. “Snow will end in 18 minutes.”  So we chatted and the snow actually let up before that.

Huey got to work, mounting the birdfeeder so that its camera faced the trees. He attached a pole for the solar panel.

A little camera is housed at the back of the feeder. It has a wide angle lens, and it was impossible to face it so that it never gets sunstruck because north would be pointing at my neighbor’s deck and house, invading their privacy. I wanted my row of evergreen trees as the background, and I was surprised to see that the lens makes them look so small.

The camera produces videos, but I am able to advance them slowly and get screenshots. The following screenshots are from a video of a goldfinch at the feeder.

A goldfinch is a small bird, not nearly as big as a house finch. This one was peacefully feeding when another bird swooped in. You can see it in front of the pampas grass, blurred from its speed. 

The little goldfinch saw it and raised its wings to say, “No! Keep away.”

The interloper dropped close to the ground, and then flew back up toward the trees. For a moment, it looked like it was flying back to the feeder, but then it rose up in the air and flew away.

The finch turned back to the feeder and continued its meal.

I’ve often seen little confrontations of birds, but being able to slow down the video and observe their body language is very interesting.