I haven’t posted to my website in several weeks, mainly due to computer problems which are yet to be fully resolved. My internal hard drive began to fail and I was fortunate to have been able to replace it before it completely failed. I’ve learned an important lesson about the importance of backups and am in the process of creating both an on-site backup and a cloud storage backup on the advice of a computer guru/friend. 

But while my computer activities (processing photos and posting to my blog) were compromised the situation didn’t keep me from talking photos, although my photography situation has been degraded by the lack of interesting visitors to the yard and the inclement weather conditions. I’ve accumulated a backlog of photos and as I process them I’ll attempt to use them to stretch towards better weather and the arrival of spring migrants. 

I’ll begin with a juvenile Cooper’s hawk which toured the yard on Feb 2, 2022.  I realized I wouldn’t be able to sneak into the yard for photos and had to take photos from inside the house. The extra glass degrades the photos to some extent but I was happy that I was able to obtain some photos. 

Another visitor I had to photograph through the glass was a Red-breasted Sapsucker that visited our yard for a cold bath on Feb 18.  It was the first one we had seen since the small influx we had in Dec. 

While I’m on the subject of yard birds I’ll mention that we have finally, for about the past couple of weeks, had a single male Varied thrush visit the yard on a daily basis.  (It was missing on Mar 8.) The bird is super wary and I have to have a lot of time and patience to obtain photos. In past winters we have had Varied thrushes for most of the winter, but this year even the snows failed to bring the thrushes down from the mountains and into our yard.

Here’s a photo I took of the thrush on Mar 6.

And finally I want to close with some advice… I can’t emphasize how important it is to back up important information (photos, communications, genealogy, etc.) on your computer!!!  Hard drives don’t last forever!