Our Stellar's Jays are growing up...

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The Stellar's Jay babies are all doing well it seems!  Chris found out that the parents mate for life, not sure if this is the first go around for these two or not, this nest has been on the porch so it may be a nest that they are coming back to from last year.
There are four babies, they are getting bigger.  Both Mom and Dad participate in the feeding.  The webcam shots are not the best, but in the one below you can see both parents in there and one of them actually in the process of feeding the babies.  I also included a cell phone picture I took while they were off the nest.  You can click on the pictures and see larger versions.

Snow, in May? Come on....Really?

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Yikes, it started snowing at our 2500' elevation early this morning, go figure.  Been snowing off and on all day, must be crazy up in Tahoe if we're getting it...

The Pasture WebCam picture below is from this morning, before we lost power.  Back on now.

Steller's Jay babies are here...

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The eggs have hatched, I was able to catch the momma off the nest and grab a little video of the tiny blobs that will grow into Stellar's Jays...

New baby birds!

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We have a Stellar's Jay nest out on our porch, I put a web cam on it so we can keep tabs on them, couldn't get a good angle though without really disturbing things so it's a little hard to see, otherwise I would stream it live so people could watch.  In the picture below you can see the father bird bringing some food in, the momma is hard to see in the nest.  The birds hatched today.  It looks like the momma leaves the nest a bit during the day, so if I can I'll grab a quick photo of the babies....

What a rain season!

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Rain season for our area is October through April.  During that period of time, my weather station measured 62.26" of rain and that doesn't include any water run-off from the snow (click here if you want to see the data). 

There is another personal weather station a few miles away at a slightly higher elevation, they measured 62.17" of rain during the same period, so I don't think my gauge is off!

My weather station wasn't around for the 2009-2010 season, but the other one was.  They got 48.82", so this year it was 13.35" more than last, that's quite a big jump!

Lots of water this year, that is for sure...and it's May, it's we're getting thunder / lightening and rain right now!