Saturday, July 28, 2007

A golden Saturday afternoon

On Saturday I went out to check out the Long Meadow Lake unit of the Minnesota Valley NWR. I decided to go check out the bass pond area where I there was a lot of activity on my past visit. It was a gorgeous day with plenty of sunshine and temps in the mid 80s. There were a lot of wildflowers in bloom in the fields around the ponds.
Near the boardwalk that goes out over the southern bass pond I spotted an american goldfinch.

I sat and watch for about 15 minutes as the finch pulled seeds out of a pod.
He would strip the silky parachute threads from the actual seed
Then he would discard the threads and eat the seeds
Sometimes it is more fun to watch them eat the natural way then to eat at bird feeders.
In the same area there were several eastern tiger swallowtail sipping nectar from the blooming flowers.


Some of the swallowtail had some damaged wings.

I took some pictures of other birds and butterflies that afternoon but I will post them later so that I can keep with my gold theme for this post.



3 comments:

spacedlaw said...

Hi there.
I can into your blog to see the pictures of the bridge disaster but I must say your pictures are beautiful.

Ecobirder said...

Thank you very much. If you liked my photos you will probably like a new blog that I found this week. Check out John Mike's blog at http://www.weekendshoot.blogspot.com/. I was very impressed by his shots. I hope that you come back and visit ecobirder again.

The Ridger, FCD said...

Nice goldfinch shots! There's a pair (or two?) around here, but he always perches way at the top of trees! My shots of him are mostly just this bright yellow spot.