dewdrop we must live in the same part of town
4/12/2020 at 3:59 PM
Or else there are a lot of merlins this spring. Or else a few very busy ones that get around a lot.
This pic was taken Mar 30. Look carefully and you see dinner in its claw. Your merlin was doing 'dine-in': mine was doing 'take-out'. ( The pic taken immediately before this one is too gory for a fickle public that doesn't appreciate that those of us at the top of the food chain have to eat too. And I so like the "what are you looking at" attitude that merlin shows in this pic.)
There were several days then when there wasn't a junco, sparrow, nuthatch, finch or chickadee to be seen. They were all 'sheltering in place' to use that relatively new phase.
The merlins - I know that there are two of them because I hear two, but I haven't seen two at one time. They keep calling to each other. In fact they are sometimes so noisy I wonder how they actually catch anything, I pointed this out to my granddaughter. She wondered what they were saying.
I told her ( Natural history class ) that I understood bird and that the first one had said "Hey, there's a real fat juicy one over here!" The other replied "But here's three good ones over here!" And the first one came back with "Are we eating in or taking out tonight?" My granddaughter merely said "oh Grandpa, you're full of it" And I said "You're right".
On edit, I meant to add that if Adam had a couple of these Merlins around his fruit trees - then the fruit would be safe from the fruit eating birds and he wouldn't need a cat. On the other hand: dog would then have nothing to do except bark at merlins and would need to be retired.
Edited by plane watcher, 2020-04-12 16:10:12