Wednesday, March 19, 2008

New-to-me Bird


Birdwatching stuff--skip this if you're not interested, but I just saw a pair of birds I'd never seen before.

It was apparent they were dove--dove have a pretty distinctive appearance. They were sitting in my driveway when I got off work today, and fluttered up to the neighbor's fence as I drove up. They were quite reddish-brown, but even more distinctive--the outer half of their wings were a rusty red. Even redder than their bodies. And they were small. a fair bit smaller than Mourning Dove and a whole LOT smaller than Rock Dove, AKA Pigeons. So I came inside to look them up, and found that they are Common Ground Doves. You can't see the red wings in this picture, but the color of this guy's beak--that's about how red the wings were. Ground dove mostly live in Mexico, but they come this far up into the U.S. and they don't migrate. Pretty cool, I think.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I totally understand the excitation that you can feel when you see a bird you haven't seen before, I had the same experience a few weeks ago, whith a bird called "Traquet tarrier", in french.

I just finished reading "the eternal rose", in english, this last evening, and I loved it !
Congratulations for your new editor.

And sorry for my very bad english, I promess I understand english better than I write it ! :D

Gail Dayton said...

Your English sounds VERY much better than my French. (Which was the language I studied forever ago in college, because it sounds so wonderful...)

Thank you for your wonderfully kind words about the book! Je t'adore! (If you don't mind me being so familiar ;) )

Okay, my Word Verification thingie is XOLDUMBR--which reminds me a little of "Dumber and Dumber", and also has the word Old in it... Is the computer universe trying to tell me something?