Sharp!

As soon as I got this up on my screen, I knew it was going to be the "one" today. I have tried SO many times to get a good shot of the red-bellied woodpecker's barbed tongue, so to say that I am happy with this would be an understatement. I took this from about 8 feet away, then cropped it pretty tightly so that you can see the details of her tongue. Pretty amazing, isn't it? The tongue is barbed so that they can snag insects from under the bark on trees. Nature never fails to astonish me.

Most of the rest of today's shots were blue jays doing their usual blue jay stuff...

scaring the crap out of each other...

demonstrating their own spiffy tongue moves

showing off her nice looking butt

and hanging out, looking like The Godfather

All in a day's work for the jays. While a turkey vulture drifted along overhead, enjoying the view.

The weather people got it wrong today (in our favor, for a change) and now we only expect to get a couple of inches of snow up where we are. Southern NJ is still looking at about a foot, which is a bummer for them. As for me, I'm happy with only a few inches. We still have a hard-packed, icy snow cover everywhere so we don't need more.

Thanks for sending little Dudley-kiev flying into the Spotlight yesterday! He's very full of himself now, demanding peanuts, fresh water and who knows what else. I'm going to have to contact the Squirrel's Union rep...

Happy Sunday, people.

Debbi