Today we've broken into the 20s (yay!) and there's no wind, so it's bracing instead of "holy crap if I don't get inside this minute I'll freeze to death." (OK, so maybe that's a tiny bit hyperbolic, but it has been pretty cold around here lately.) Anyway, after dawning my new pair of (faux) fur-lined boots* I took a walk up to the pond, and it was teeming with life. Whee!
There were kids playing hockey on the ice (if tweens don't count as wildlife, I don't know what does), foraging squirrels and ducks (who have a corner of the pond that hasn't frozen over - it's got running water), several robins and this guy:
A downy woodpecker, the smallest of the North American woodpeckers. I was walking by a tree when I saw a flash of red and there he was, tapping away at loose tree bark. He knew I was there and he let me observe him for several minutes... until he was chased away by what looked like his bigger brother, but was probably a Hairy Woodpecker (Picoides villosus). I'll draw him for Monday.
More birdie-liciousness today: the church hawk from downtown seems to have discovered the weather vane on the newspaper tower.
Doodled from a photo at Wikipedia.
* Spokane is the first place I've lived where there's actually a prolonged winter (as opposed to colder weather with a few isolated storms). We get snow (sometimes several feet of it), rain, ice, frigid winds, the whole nine yards... for several months of the year. As a result, I've built up a small collection of winter-only foot wear: waterproof hiking shoes for light amounts of snow, snow boots (+ gaiters) for deep snow and now a pair of (faux) fur-lined waterproof boots for when it's mostly dry but really darn cold. And about a million pairs of wool socks... because when your feet get cold or wet, it's a prescription for misery.
