Black-Capped Chickadee

"The chickadee and nuthatch are more inspiring society than statesmen and philosophers, and we shall return to these last as to more vulgar companions."
Thoreau - "A Winter Walk"

Dark-Eyed Junco - Fitchburg, Massachusetts

“How often they may be seen thus flitting along in a straggling manner from bush to bush, so that the hedgerow will be all alive with them, each uttering a faint chip from time to time, as if to keep together, bewildering you so that you know not if the greater part are gone by or still to come.”
THOREAU

Osprey - Lincoln, Massachusetts

In 1854, Henry David Thoreau wrote about an osprey fishing over Walden Pond in his classic Walden. The passage reads "...a fish hawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish..."

This one was hanging around a few abandoned Great Blue Heron nests doing some active fishing in the pond surrounding the dead tree it was standing upon. It is a great experience to witness these wild birds.

American Goldfinch - Winter Plumage

Here is an adorable little goldfinch hanging out on my feeder. It threw me off with its winter plumage. After consultation with members of MassBird, its little sparrow size makes it definitely of the finch variety.

Common Redpoll - Fitchburg, MA.

"These winter days I occasionally hear the note of a goldfinch, or maybe a redpoll, unseen, passing high overhead." ---

Thoreau: Journal - January 27, 1860


This little female Redpoll was photographed in Fitchburg, MA. on December 24, 2007. She was feeding on my windowsill and taking brief breaks in a tree to probably consume what she had stored in her mouth. She was actively eating with a group of Blackeyed Juncos.

Barred Owl - Fitchburg, Massachusetts

"One afternoon I amused myself by watching a barred owl (Strix nebulosa) sitting on one of the lower dead limbs of a white pine, close to the trunk, in broad daylight, I standing within a rod of him. He could hear me when I moved and cronched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. When I made most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and open his eyes wide; but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod. I too felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit left between their lids, by which be preserved a pennisular relation to me; thus, with half-shut eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavoring to realize me, vague object or mote that interrupted his visions. At length, on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy and sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having his dreams disturbed; and when he launched himself off and flapped through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, I could not hear the slightest sound from them. Thus, guided amid the pine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight, feeling his twilight way, as it were, with his sensitive pinions, he found a new perch, where he might in peace await the dawning of his day. "

Thoreau - WALDEN
(Chapter XIV Former Inhabitants; and winter visitors)