{"id":14989,"date":"2015-03-22T11:01:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-22T15:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/capitalcitiesusa.org\/?p=14989"},"modified":"2024-12-05T22:30:08","modified_gmt":"2024-12-06T03:30:08","slug":"two-in-the-bush","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/capitalcitiesusa.org\/?p=14989","title":{"rendered":"Two In The Bush"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"08<\/a>Linda Burton posting from Arkadelphia, Arkansas<\/em> \u2013 You need a good pair of binoculars. No, first you need plenty of feeders, some big black sunflower seed, and some tiny thistle seed. Add a backyard and a little snowfall now and then and you\u2019ve got yourself a serious detraction from writing. I\u2019m madly pushing myself to meet that deadline I set back in January \u2013 to have PAGES on the website for every capital city by March 31. But my computer faces directly on the best bird-watching site this side of an African watering pond full of pink flamingos. I\u2019ve got cardinals \u2013 nine brilliant males and their less brilliant but somewhat more charming spouses; and I\u2019ve got finches. Goldfinches I was familiar with, but I\u2019d never seen a purple finch before. I thumbed through my Birds of Arkansas<\/em> book (Stan Tekiela, 2011) to identify the red birds in the yard that didn\u2019t have a crest like the cardinals. Yes, purple finches have a red head and stick around Arkansas all winter long. According to my bird book, they travel in flocks of 50 and \u201chave a rich loud song.\u201d Why are they called purple finches if they are red? Ah, the Latin species name purpureus<\/em> means \u201ccrimson\u201d or some other reddish color.<\/p>\n

\"Mark<\/a>Deadlines. And things that get in the way of them. Mark Twain, so the story goes, couldn\u2019t seem to get finished with a certain character named Tom Sawyer. He spent his days strolling the streets of Hartford chatting with neighbors, and his evenings gathering the children in front of the fireplace in the library for \u201cstory on the spot\u201d time, lifting items from the mantelpiece and one-by-one incorporating them into a tall tale. It\u2019s said that if he missed an item, the children would squeal in delight and make him go back. Every night a different tale. Now that\u2019s creative, and certainly fun, but it didn\u2019t make for a commercial book. So Mrs Clemens, being a practical woman, banished him to their cottage in the woods until he finished what we know today as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer<\/em>. Not being blessed with such a task-master, I goofed off with birds. <\/p>\n

I paper-clipped a page in the bird book every time I identified another backyard bird. I\u2019m up to 22 now, counting the \u201cruby-throated hummingbird\u201d that hasn\u2019t returned from Costa Rica yet but stayed with me all last summer. New to me was the white-breasted nuthatch, which hangs around Arkansas year-round, and the dark-eyed junco, which flies down from Canada to winter here. Both are neat little birds, about 5\u201d long. The nuthatch is unusual in that it climbs down a tree trunk headfirst, spotting insects that other birds missed going the other direction. The junco can be seen \u201cdouble-scratching\u201d for seeds on the ground \u2013 that is, scratching with both feet at the same time.<\/p>\n

Another bird that was new to me is the cowbird, a member of the blackbird family but with a head of chocolate brown. The cowbirds are a lesson in \u201cbad citizenship.\u201d Too lazy to build their own nests, they are the only parasitic birds in Arkansas laying eggs in hosts birds\u2019 nests, leaving others to raise their young. Most birds (like humans would do) just go ahead and incubate the uninvited eggs and raise the babies as their own \u2013 warblers have been seen feeding young birds twice their size. Which brings me to that spring frenzy known as mating and nesting.\"02<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cHurry Quincy! We can\u2019t cut down any trees that have nests in them.\u201d Quincy and Dante continued to clear brush and work to reclaim my back yard, but the the tulip poplar is already blooming and the birds mean business.<\/p>\n

Hurry Linda! The website needs your attention. Capital cities! Focus!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Linda Burton posting from Arkadelphia, Arkansas \u2013 You need a good pair of binoculars. No, first you need plenty of feeders, some big black sunflower seed, and some tiny thistle seed. Add a backyard and a little snowfall now and then and you\u2019ve got yourself a serious detraction from writing. I\u2019m madly pushing myself to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4588],"tags":[3124,2202,3127,3130,3099,3126,362,3128,1176,3129,3123,3125],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/capitalcitiesusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14989"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/capitalcitiesusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/capitalcitiesusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capitalcitiesusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capitalcitiesusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14989"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/capitalcitiesusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15006,"href":"https:\/\/capitalcitiesusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14989\/revisions\/15006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/capitalcitiesusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capitalcitiesusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capitalcitiesusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}