I was delighted to see the first Dark-eyed Junco of the season this morning in the trees on the east side of the house! Just the one, but I trust that he/she will be joined by a cohort of peers before long. They're one of my favorite winter birds, but were rare visitors to my yard in Tennessee. I have fond memories of my father, who was the person who instilled in me a love of birds in the first place, bringing pitchforks full of old hay off the barn floor and scattering the chaff around on top of the snow so the Juncos could pick out the seeds. [This in western Mass., where I grew up.] This made an unsightly mess on top of the white snow, but the rewards of watching the Juncos having such a good time feeding more than compensated for any aesthetic offense caused by the piles of strewn chaff.
An even better treat for the day was the first-ever sighting in our yard of a Ruby-crowned Kinglet! He or she was bopping around in the brush on the verge between the lawn and the woods. Kinglets are tiny, peripatetic little things, that are always fun to watch--though they rarely stick around in any one place long enough to give birders much of a show! I was a bit surprised to realize that we'd not seen any kinglets in the yard before now; they may well have been here without us having seen them. We saw a Golden-crowned on Plum Island last week, and had seen Ruby-crowns at Wells Reserve at Laudholm Farm in Wells back in May. I'm told that October is a good month to see kinglets at Laudholm--I'll have to venture there again soon!
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