Guess who is back??? Mr. and Mrs. Pileated Woodpecker

Today we had they pleasure of seeing the Pileated Woodpecker again! I have been patiently awaiting his return. Not only did he return, but he brought his mate with him. Yes, you heard me right I had our Male Pileated and Female Pileated together today!!! I can not tell you how thrilled Kelly and I were. They visited a dead tree in our back yard for a little date time snacking, lol. 

I can not even begin to tell you how amazing this is. This picture was taken from the deck door in my Master Bedroom. Kelly and I set up a chair and Scope and enjoyed them mostly all day. We just couldn't stop watching. It's super rare to catch one of these birds in the wild, let alone a pair like this.

Definitely the blurriest pictures I have ever taken, but I still enjoy the thrill of trying to capture the.

After they left and went into our woods to check out what they were 'snacking', and this is a close up of the tree where they spent most of the day. I was almost thinking they were trying to nest at one pint. How incredible would that have been. I could;t be that lucky, could I?

This day was definitely for the record books. I don't think I will ever catch the chance of seeing the two of them together like this again. It's good to know there is a couple here, and that they will be mating in my backyard sometime in the future, so cool! 

Chipping Sparrow

Today is a really quick post with just one picture of a Chipping Sparrow. This little guy is super cute. To me he looks like he has on a stripped racing helmet. very different, and I was able to spot him out very quickly amongst the other sparrows. Glad he came for a visit today. 

The Cardinal, The Squirrel and The Grackle - Oh My!

Do you know when you take a picture of something, and totally love it, well that happened to me today a few times today. Check out this gorgeous pictures of a male Cardinal that came for a visit today. The word stunning would be an understatement.  I love the black mask he has on his face, it makes him look like a super hero.

Then this fuzzy cutie showed up. I love this picture so much. The detail I captured is so amazing in this fox squirrel (I think that is what he is). I'm loving my new camera. I love how he seems to be creeping along, probably planning to rob one of my bird feeders, lol. Our yard is filled with these, so I'm going to have to come up with some good anti squirrel bird feeding techniques.

Finally I had a VERY unwelcome visitor today as my last guest. This here is a Grackle, and I hope to see as few of these as possible. The shame is I actual think these birds are gorgeous looking. They have an iridescent blue sheen on them that lights up in the sunlight and it makes them look very sleek. Unfortunately, they will gobble up your seed in a matter of a few minutes. I allowed this one to pose for a picture and then I promptly shoed him away, lol. Yes I was the crazy lady running across her lawn and up to her bird feeder screaming, 'Get Away Get Away!!!!'. 

That's a wrap for today. See yogis again soon! 

I Told You So (AGAIN) - Blue Bird

One of the main birds I have been trying to attract to this yard is a Blue Bird. According to my Bird Books they are in this area in abundance. I know a lot of time they are attracted to worm feeding, but I can not bring myself to do it.  Since I do not worm feed, I figured my chances for spotting one would be extremely low. I asked Kelly about them and he said he had never seen one in our yard before. I was not to hopeful, but I set out to work my Bird Magic and see if I could lure one in. After the Pileated Woodpecker sighing, I figured anything was possible, lol.

WELCOME MR. BLUEBIRD (OR MRS.) 

This is the coolest of all things. It traveled quickly through the yard, but I knew I had to grab a picture or Kelly may not believe that I actually saw one here. When I sent him the picture he was totally shocked :) Just call me the Queen of luring in birds, lol. Oh wait, I TOLD YOU SO YET AGAIN!

The White Breasted Nuthatch

I have a cute little White Breasted Nuthatch that has been visiting here a lot. The recent intense heat is keeping all of my birds well hidden. We are in the midst of a severe heat wave here in the Midwest! My birds really are not liking it at all, and neither am I. They are eating less and less at my feeders and are in hiding (the shaded trees). My food has been untouched.

The picture quality on these are not that fabulous as is usual these days, lol. I'm still working with my camera to get things right. I figured taking bird picture would be easy...point, auto focus, and shoot. I'm now realizing there is much more to it than that :) 

Red Bellied Woodpecker

Yes Yes Yes, it finally happened and this big fellow showed up in the yard today! He is my very first Red Bellied Woodpecker. I'm hoping he is one of many that decide to frequent this year, he didn't hit the feeders, but he is sniffing around on the ground which is a good sign. He is a lot bigger than I expected him to be, and it was really a thrill to see him. I knew what he looked like from my birding books so I was hoping to spot one.  Now lets hope he brings his friends for a free buffet. I have a variety of things out that he should really take quickly too.  As you can see from this picture we seriously need to cute the grass HAHA :) 

Cleaning Up More Flower Beds

Today we cleaned the right side of the house. We had some serious overgrown weeds all over the place and some over grown ornamental grass that needed some serious attention. It was spreading all over the place and needed to be tamed.  We had done some cleaning in this area before, but today we will add the final touches. 

We needed a method for confining the wild grass and Kelly came up with a great idea to use our left over flower bed pavers to keep the grasses isolated just around the satellite dish area. I did not want the grass growing into the near by bush you see here in the above picture. It was overwhelming the bush and killing it.  As you can see we confined it! 

(Update 2014 - The above picture makes me really sad. Maddie is in the picture , The grey colored cat, and she went missing just after this picture. It was a heartbreaking lose for my husband and I. Very sad to see her in these pictures, it seemed things were so perfect than. A perfect moment in time). 

SNAKE!!!, Run as fast as you can.

I know I have mentioned in a past post the importance of keeping tall grass trimmed down from the base of trees in our yard. When the grass is too tall it is an open invitation for a black rat snake to come visit.  Well as  you can see by this picture, the grass at base of tree was way too high.  Of course since this incident, Kelly has done an awesome job keeping the base of trees clean of brush, but that is now and this was then. 

I was out just minding my own business at this tree checking out the bird feeder above attached to it. I think I was trying to determine if it needed refilling. I got REALLY close to the base of the tree and before I knew what was happening this snake popped out and whipped it tail and scurried back down. I must have startled it when I approached the tree, but in the process it's tail hit my lower leg. Oh boy did I freak out. I even called Kelly at work crying, LOL.  The feeling of the tail touching my leg haunted me for days. I still feel a bit queasy just thinking about it - HAHAHA :) I was smart enough to grab my cell phone and snap a few quick shots. I was so not going to have Kelly tell me I imagined it all. I also had never seen a black rat snake up close before, and the size and girth of it had me shaking in my shoes. Here is the tree with and without the snake hiding around it.

I highlighted in the red box where he was hiding. Look at how alarmingly thick it is. It looks thicker than a garden hose. I feel faint looking at the picture, lol. That nasty thing touched my leg. For weeks I could not hang my legs over the sides of anything (the bed etc) even in the car with my legs hanging over the sea without fear of something coming to get me!

That same day Kelly cut down the grass the surrounds this tree :) 

Yard and Flowers for Today

I'm totally not going to apologize for this, but todays post is going to be INSANE picture heavy. For those of you that have slow internet, run do not walk, lol. So I went picture happy today so I'm going to split today's posts into two separate post. One post will be for flowers and the yard stuff, and one post will be for birds and bird feeders. Yes, there are THAT many pictures. Let's start with the front window garden area.

Short of this little girl mysteriously blowing up in a million pieces, be prepared to see her time and again for the lifetime of this blog :)

The new kid on the block. We went back to that same garden center and found this little beauty to match with my fountain. She is currently on the back deck of the house, but she will eventually work her way to the from of the house. I think I start to say that OVERALL my photography skills have stared to improve. I guess it doesn't hurt that I went out and splurged on a new Canon 60D :) My Dream camera has arrived.

My Mom visited this Spring for NY, and we planted a bunch of stuff. Amongst those plants are these two Bushes shown below (Update: both of these did not make it - like so many we planted too early this year and were fooled by the early warm weather). I'm glad I got these pictures of them, they definitely are beautiful and remind me of my Mother. 

Here goes the awesome photography I promised you guys, lol. I can't promise it will aways be this awesome, but it's a far cry from when I started this blog. I have to remember to take out my GOOD camera and get REAL pictures whenever I can.  The colors where speaking to me today!

Around the Yard..

Cleaning up some messy spots in the yard

Kelly and I are at it again. We have a few eye sores that have been bugging us for a while and we finally decided to tackle them. First up is this tree. Out here in the country Black Rat Snakes can get into the yard really easy, especially if you have tall weeds and grass at the base of your tress. We decided as an experiment to do this one up and lay in some gravel to give it a manicured look. In hind sight, I wish we hadn't used 'white' gravel, it's a bit on the tacky side, but it was what we had at the time. We can always refresh and update it if the need arrises.

Below, we also had another eye soar in the yard. The prior owner thought it would be a good idea to put bricks around this tree. As you can see below, it was really hurting and looking sad.  It wasn't easy, but Kelly dug out what he could. 

Finally, below is a peak at our new raised flower bed which I really love. For now it only has a few lonely flowers in it, but I hope to fill it up soon :) 

More yard project and flowers coming soon...

Halloween is here again

It's that time of year folks for our Halloween decorations to go up. Unfortunately this year I focused more indoors than I did out doors with my pictures. I do have a few outside shots so I am going to include them here. THEY ARE BEYOND TERRIBLE, and I'm a little embarrassed to put them out there, but it's all I got. They were taken at night, but an outside picture is still an outside picture, even if it's blurry and impossible to see :) 

One thing I know for sure is check out my Giant Marigolds coming down the side of the walk way on the right. Kelly added a bed to that side of the walk and did Giant Marigolds, and BAM those thing bloomed like wild fire. It's October and they are still going strong. Say hi to the creepy hanging skelton that kinda looks like he is staring at you, LOL!!! Are you curious what Kelly was for Halloween this year? CREEEEEPY is what he was with a Capitol 'C', lol. You can throw SCARY in that too.  Smile Boys!

Stay tuned for some wonderful new projects coming up for 2012!

Hummingbird Feeders

Today I added Humming Bird feeders to the new window garden area. This blog IS called BIRDEES and BLOOMS, so it's reasonable to say I need to start posting some bird stuff. Let's try and gets some birds in this yard. I figured Hummingbirds would be fairly easy to pull in, and my research says this area is loaded with them. I never seen one in my area of NY, so I'm quite excited at the possibility of seeing them here. Now that I have these awesome flowers every where I'm seriously starting to take a major interest in birds. I'm a novice, but with some research on the internet I have started a game plan for getting some birds to come hang out with us in our lovely new garden area. My cats should just LOVE that, lol. 

I am going to apologize for my bad photography skills here again. IX-NAY on the vertical pictures and the cheesey ball frame!!! Hopefully the Hummingbirds forgive me and come for some yummy food anyway.

Bring on the Hummingbirds...

Timbeeeeeeeeeeeeer - Tree Down

Today this beautiful tree must come down. It got some type of rot, I'm wanting to say pine-rot but not 100% that was the case.  It is spreading around a lot of the pines trees in this area. I even seen a few dead Pines in the neighbors yard as well. It's not pretty and quite sad. Here is the poor thing at the peak of it's destress. We had to put it out of it's misery and take it down.

BYE BYE ...TIMBEEEEEEEEEER!

Creating another new planting area

Today we decided to create a new planting area in a lonely spot in our yard. It faces the neighbors so we are thinking of doing some perimeter planting or bushes. My original thought for this area was Hydrangea bushes, but I think it's direct sunlight and too hot for that type of bush. We used our container garden pots to mark out 5 squares to dig up. 

We ended up planting butterfly bushes here that did well for a few years until I cut them back to the ground for winter. I killed those suckers real fast doing that, lol. I was pretty sure I read on the internet you were supposed to cut them down. Oh well, Kelly has called me a plant killer for ever and in this case I lived up to my nickname! 

SNOWmagedon 2011

THIS WAS THE BIG ONE, I am sure of it. The biggest snow that the Midwest has seen for awhile, and I have a feeling it will hit the record books for sure. It may never happen like this again for a LONG LONG time so I want to document it here. I wasn't originally NOT going to include winter stuff here, but this was such a monster storm it needs to go down in the books, or at least in my books.

IT STARTED LIKE THIS...

Okay this was just a wow! This is our garage's back door. We opened it up to get a peak at what was really out there. Having a great big yard can be really fun and rewarding, but someone has to clean it up when it snows and that someone is Kelly, lol.  Let's get out there and see how really bad it is? UM WHAAAAT :) Kelly is over 6 feet tall, and the snow is over his knees! BUT oddly enough, look under that tree to the left, GROUND??? Weird. It's all about the snow drifts here. We had drifts in NY too, but not like this. We had areas of our year from this storm that where up to Kelly's chest area! 

I didn't feel too bad for him because he was dying to jump on his 4 wheeler and start pushing snow. He cleaned up our garage landing area, but that was about it, we needed a front loader to clear the rest of our drive which was just downright CRAZY!!!

It looks like ice-cream oh so YUMMY! I love taking pictures of the snow 'untouched'. The house was basically buried. I wonder if we ever get a snow like this again?

The pond is under there somewhere. Where did it go?  Below, the kitty cats got their own private pathway cut for them. My Cats love being out in the snow, or at least Salem doesn't mind too much. She let's me know when she is ready to come in and warm up near the fire. 

LET ME IN you crazy people. don't you know it's cold out here! This is our princess Salem :)

Stay tuned. As soon as all this none sense melts, Kelly and I will be prepping for the 2012 planting season. We still have a ton of projects left to get the outdoor living space up to par.