Some "cool" birds

At work I have been cleaning out the park library.  I got rid of lots of books and lots of other things we don't need in the library.  There are 18 empty slide carousels and some projectors, a bunch of blueprints and a dartboard.  The dart board belongs to a co-worker who has promised to take it home.  We also have a refridgerator and small kitchen with a microwave.  Once I was finished with the library part of the room I tackled the kitchen.  I started with the kitchen cupboards--gross!  I threw out food that had expired in 2003 and lots of hot sauce packets and sugar packets, old tea and I washed about 10 mugs that had coffee stains in them from years ago.

Once I tackled the fridge and freezer...it got tougher.  We have a collection of frozen snakes I use for my reptile programs but I weeded through those and kept the good ones, threw out the mangled road kill snakes everyone had saved because no one ever threw anything away.  Ever.  These snakes are in there because past and current employees had found them dead, wound them up and put them in the freezer.  I also found a couple bags of dead birds--ash throated flycatchers that had flown into the building, died and been stuck in the freezer with blood still on their heads.  I threw those out too--too disturbing to keep.  So now the kitchen and library are in good working condition almost--a few more things to get rid of and make more space for working and developing programs.

On the subject of cool birds though, it's more fun to watch birds that are alive and running around looking for food.  I went to my boyfriend's house in Blanding.  He said he's got waist-deep snow and I wanted to see it!  It is really that deep--he's got tunnels built from his house to the woodpile and his shop and the driveway is a tunnel too.  I was looking out the window--he feeds his wild birds with seed from his shop--there are spotted tohees, dark-eyed juncos, scrub jays and pinyon jays visiting his yard.  The pinyon jays this week were a surprise, he usually doesn't see groups o them down there.  In the summer he's got oriols, that I like watching.  I want to learn more birds but I have been really slow about it.

spotted tohee--from utahbirds.org.