Familiar Friend

Early this morning we left for about an hour, and when we returned, we spooked a spruce grouse out of one of our snow-packed trails, where there was a teeny bit of gravel showing. It flew up into the trees right by our studio window. Had not seen one of these for a long time. He/she is still there about 4 hours later, and meanwhile, we've spread a little more gravel on the pathways that she or he might like.

Owl on the Kenai River Flats

Today we saw the owl once again, and it sat there while we backed up and looked with binoculars. It was not a short-eared owl, but a hawk owl, horizontal brown and white streaks on his breast, very beautiful.

Blizzard Weather

We've been having blizzards and a lot of snow. A lot of redpolls are coming in, along with our chickadees, nuthatches, several magpies, and stellar's jays. No siskins presently. The brown creeper shows up often enough, that we're pretty sure he's a daily customer. We did have a northern shrike three times in the last week and a half. Probably also a sharp-shinned hawk, as occasionally the yard is cleared of birds, except for a nuthatch frozen into position for 2-3 minutes. We can't see a hawk but that doesn't mean he isn't there back behind a tree out of view from our windows. Several snowshoe hares frequently coming in. Nothing else of note. We did see a smallish - medium-sized owl in the top of tree on the Kenai River flats the other day, we decided based only on size, that it was probably a short-eared owl. We turned around to go back and see it, but the instant we changed the flow of traffic the owl took off.