Pine Grosbeaks in the Yard

Well I decided to move my blog from Wordpress to Blooger.com. I was messing around with templates and screwed things up and got frustrated and said "Fuck it" so I move everything over to this place since I am more familiar with blogger than wordpress.

Well I had several immature or female Pine Grosbeaks in the yard today and decided since the sun was beeming on them, I took some photos of them. I am still trying to figure out digiscoping and understanding my Nikon 4500 Coolpix camera, so I took several images in different types camera settings.

This is another bird giving me a different view. Oh by the way the birds are eating on our ornamental crab trees that I planted 9 years ago. They are a species of ornamental crab apples that the University of Minnesota came up with and they are tough against diseases and bloom every spring with a shower of reds and pinks.

Well my dear friend Laura Erickson is going through a lot of emotions as she resigned as staff ornithologist for Binoculars.com. Binoculars.com was sold to a larger company in Nebraska and part of sell was Birder Blog that Laura spent a lot of time writing each day numerous times on environmental issues, friends, birding issues, her travels, happenings in the backyard, in Duluth and surrounding areas and everything in between! Laura's blog was HUGE! Laura wants her blog or the contents of the blog back to her ownership but the owners are acting like idiots and refusing to do so! Laura has a new blog site: http://lauraerickson.blogspot.com/

Well my son Ben was again a victim of more bullying at recess and Monica and I went to the Duluth School District and we now have the harassment cordinator looking into what is going at the school. She is going to give presentation in each of the classes about the problems with bullies and harmful effects children go through when they are being bullied in schools. I am glad for this and hopefully by doing this the kids will learn to play together rather than fight or argue with each other during recess or during school.

On Sunday my eldest daughter will be trying out or playing with the AAU Northern Lights Basketball Team. This is a very intense but very fun league where college players or ex players coach girls who dedicated to playing at a high level of basketball. Becca is very excited in learning new ways to improve her game.

Becca is one the top 6th graders in the western district of Duluth. At 12 years old she is 5'9" and averaged 20 pts per game plus 15+ rebounds per game at the 6th grade rec level and at the 7th grade travel league she averaged about 6-8 pts per game and 10 rebounds. She will return to the 7th grade travel squad next year. Her dreams is to get a full scholarship to play b-ball at a major university and major in Marine Biology or English. (she wants to be a author as well)

This is the time of the year where birding is rather slow. Winter species are still around, the snow is melting slowly, migration comes in small bites vs. large movements they witness in southern Minnesota or western Minnesota. Spring doesn't really show its face till late April in or around Duluth.

Well here is one more photo of the grosbeaks in our yard. I used a sponge filter on photoshop to create this texture and it really turned out pretty good.