Birding in Nashville Tennessee

I guess I should add “birding” to my ever-growing list of hobbies.

There’s no shortage of wildlife in Nashville. We have wild turkeys, fox, bobcats, snakes, deer by the dozens, and – apparently- lots and lots of birds.

It’s hard to miss the fairly common cardinal or blue jay hopping around the front lawn or perched in a nearby tree.

peekaboo

So, for Christmas, we got this fancy new bird feeder.

Apparently the birds around here really like it….

Yes, we’ll take a 5-top.

Accompanying the bird feeder was special bird seed. It promised to attract 20x more colorful birds. We thought that was an amusing statistic. Other than the non-colorful bird discrimination, of course.

Man, those birds ARE colorful! Maybe that bird seed does have magical properties…

American goldfinch

Even the non-colorful ones are colorful… (That’s a female- i.e. “non-colorful”- cardinal. But she’s got some flare, no? Love the flaming mohawk and wing tips!)

I never thought we’d turn in to full-fledged ornithologists. Every morning, we had new subject matter to photograph – then we’d start Google searching to identify unknown birds.

Sosuke enjoys the birds as well. I’ve never seen him climb a tree before. He just gets that excited…

White-breasted nut hatch

He obviously likes nuts

Another colorful female cardinal- she’s a stout-healthy lass!

blue birds

Downy woodpecker

One of my “non-colorful” favorites.

So, I really just wanted a chance to showcase Alan’s new penchant – and talent- for bird photography. I also wanted to dispel any myth that the polar vortex, single digit weather we’ve been having scares off all of the wildlife. On the contrary, these colorful critters have been out with a vengeance. If you feed them, they will come, apparently.