Yellowed-Bellied Sapsucker

Posted on June 22, 2017 by TJ

Our alarm goes off every morning at 6 a.m. First thing I do is pull on my old raggedy pair of jeans and an old shirt and then go let the ducks and chickens out of their coop and fill the ducks’ pools. As I headed back into the house, it was beginning to rain. It was a deluge. It rained for a couple of hours.

All day the clouds looked heavy with rain but we didn’t get any more rain except for a few sprinkles now and then throughout the day. Radar shows more rain moving in this evening and meteorologists say we could get a thunderstorm tonight.

Once the rain stopped, I went on my walk down and up the driveway. I don’t manage to walk the driveway every day, but I’m trying to as much as possible. I walked down and up the driveway five times, then later I walked three more times for a total of eight. I had planned to walk two more times this evening, but I don’t want to get caught in the rain.

I enjoy looking at the flowers as I walk down the driveway. Yesterday I saw that four of the lilies I had transplanted along the driveway had bloomed and many more would burst into flower soon. I envisioned the driveway lined with beautiful orange lilies. But today I noticed that some of them looked as if they had been cut off. I suspected they had been eaten, but I wasn’t sure what would eat lilies. So when I finished my first session of walking, I searched on-line and discovered that deer love lilies. One site said that lilies are like bon bons to deer. Bummer. I don’t mind if the deer eat the birdseed in the winter, but I do mind that they eat the lilies. Besides, we planted a lot of yummy grasses just for them to enjoy. They shouldn’t eat my lilies.

Here are just a few of the wildflowers I see as I walk down the driveway:

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The last couple of days, I’ve seen a bird clinging to the side of a power line as I’ve walked along the driveway. It was too far for me to see it clearly and it flew away when I got closer. It was obviously a woodpecker, but it didn’t look quite like the ones I’m familiar with. Today I was able to take a photo of it and after I uploaded the photo to my computer, I opened our Birds of Michigan book and easily identified the woodpecker as a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. You can see my photo at the top of this post. It’s always thrilling to spot a bird that I’ve never seen before. This is the second new bird this week!

I spent all afternoon working on this blog. With the help of WordPress support, I worked at putting together albums of photos. I also figured out how to put the list of posts at the bottom of the page, which I think looks much better. However, now I’m not quite sure what to place in the middle column where the posts used to be. I’ll have to think about it.