Kestrels are cool.

Well, the weather has continued to be infuriatingly warm, with highs of 47 degrees yesterday. FORTY SEVEN. Unbelievable. Something that I've beginning to observe as I've been paying attention, is that some of our typical winter bird species are becoming more rare, and some rare (more southern) species have become more common. For example, I've seen very few black-eyed juncos (when I remember groups of 20-30 at a time from my childhood) and an increasing number of little gray titmice, which I've hardly ever seen. It's sort of frightening, because it means that with the warmer temperatures, species are in fact moving north--as has been predicted.

In spite of global warming, my quest to find critters to photograph has been fairly productive. Yesterday I spent a good deal of the day outside wandering around the local nature center and surrounding land and managed to fill up an entire 1GB memory card. I've begun editing the photos that I upload, believe it or not, and what you'll see there is usually only like a third of what I actually shot. I got more geese, which I'm beginning to believe isn't so impressive, as they are everywhere. Although that fact is making me rather fond of the geese, because everything else I've been trying to shoot is just too damn fast. I've also been shooting some interesting landscape and vegetative elements, mostly shorelines and dead prairie plants. The photos of the stalks aren't very informative, so I've just been cutting down the more interesting plants and taking them home. I've been thinking of doing some close-up kinds songbird paintings with these plants I've been collecting (right now I have some big dried out milkweed pods, cattails, thistles, yucca, and some stuff I can't exactly identify). I'm actually looking forward to painting some from life. Now I just need some decent references of the birds. The Black-capped Chickadees are particularly annoying, as they have the habit of flitting down to a feeder, taking one seed, and then taking off to eat it somewhere else. This means that as soon as I can focus on one on a feeder, it takes off. I'll have to find another way. This is opposed to the more sensible birds like cardinals and jays and sparrows, which will settle in to gorge themselves. The corvids have been elusive as well, I think they're more aware of when your attention is on them, as opposed to the geese. I got a few shots, but nothing I'm enthusiastic about.

Much to my delight, however, our local nature center has recently acquired a little male American Kestrel from the Raptor Center in Minneapolis. While I was shooting photos of him in his fiber-glass enclosure, an friend of mine(now in charge of this kind of stuff) offered to take him out so I could get some better photos. The thing is, when he's in his cage, it's the temperature it is outside, so he fluffs up his feathers because it's sort of cold--which is adorable, and is how I would prefer to paint him in a winter scene--but when he's inside, he flattens out his feathers. So I have better references of him outside the cage than in, but he's in fluff-mode inside the cage. I'll have to go back and try again--I was having trouble with the indoor settings and getting glare off the fiberglass. Still, I'm +1 captive subject.

That's most of it from the 3rd. I'll put up another update from today, for simplicity's sake.