It’s been a long winter here at Lake Tahoe with over 426-inches of snow so far. Our home is 6,460-feet above sea level in a meadow with a creek and abundant wildlife including black bears, bobcats, red foxes, coyotes and our many feathered friends. Because the birds expend energy just staying alive without easy sources of replenishment, I feed them whenever it snows or is below freezing.
While not “birders” we do enjoy watching them out the windows with our morning coffee. The various species have different personalities and it’s fun to watch them queue up to make a run at the feeder. Blue Jays are greedy and aggressive, Mountain Chickadees are agile flyers and unafraid. Owls watch dutifully waiting for some squirrel or other animal feeding on what falls to the ground to turn their back and be surprised. A Northern Flicker and Red-Breasted Sap Sucker do their woodpecker thing on a couple of pine trees outside the windows.
All in all, it’s quite entertaining and something that we look forward to each morning. We have learned the names of the different species and reach for the field guide when someone new shows up. Fortunately, there are a lot of different birds in the forested area where we live so the variety keeps it interesting. Of course, I’ve taken the opportunity to take pictures of some of the different birds we see on a daily basis. Many shots were taken during a snowstorm and most through windows looking over the meadow, all were taken with a tripod.
All images were taken with Nikon D750 with Nikon AF Nikkor 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 D zoom lens, AF Nikkor 55mm-200mm f/4-5.6G ED (DX) zoom lens or Nikon AF Nikkor 70-210mm f/4.0-5.6 zoom lens in RAW format and processed in Adobe Lightroom Classic CC 12.0.1