Missed

A brown thrasher visited while I was changing batteries.  Then, while I was cooking, two red bellied woodpeckers had a squabble on the trunk of a dogwood.. I thought several times that I had seen a white breasted nuthatch and finally I got one blurry photo.

Juncos, pine warblers, and titmice were everywhere.  Downy woodpeckers were single-minded about suet.  Blue jays gorged on bark butter balls.  A flock of robins landed up in the trees but didn't stay.  A song sparrow kept hunkering down into the snow  and walked like its feet hurt.  The white throated sparrows foraged on the far side of the pool rather than in the snow under the feeder.  A butterbutt showed up hungry in the afternoon.

As the tide rose and fell, ice scraped against the barnacles on the pilings.  I wonder if they can survive that and the cold air?  Several buzzards took an interest in something on the creek, but drifted away.  A red tailed hawk lurked up in the snowy pines across the creek.  A surprising number of gulls scouted the frozen creek. In the late afternoon, a great blue heron stood on the ice under the bulkhead catching the setting sun. 

Tempers were high even if the temperature wasn't.  In addition to the red bellies that escaped my camera, a downy wood pecker reached its limit with a pine warbler on the suet and gave it a hard poke with its beak.  After that the warbler was more cautions but continued to feed on the suet while the woodpecker did the same. 

K had the garage open while shoveling and a Carolina wren got in.  It had been there a while when we heard it, and it some strong persuasion to get it to go back out into the cold.  (Of course, meanwhile the garage was getting colder.)  When i came back inside, I could see a Carolina wren wolfing sunflower seeds and tolerating no competition.  I wonder if it was the same one?