Last weekend of December

I wasn't even sure if I was going to go to the park today. But after my wife came down with a bad cold the night before, I didn't want to be around her germs. When I arrived at the park, some other bird watcher friends had already been hiking around for a while. Eventually I met up with them for some more hiking and we went around the entire perimeter –albeit in a roundabout fashion. With fresh snow it is easy to go off the trail and venture into places that aren't visited that often. But before all this, I had been watching a few little "tweety birds" as another friend of mine puts it, along the paved trail just north of 73rd Avenue. There were Cardinals, Chickadees, Finches and Juncos among the thick brush. Here I caught a snapshot of a Dark-eyed Junco eating from what appeared to be a dried up Goldenrod plant. I've been reading recently about how important it is to leave native plants standing through the winter as they provided food sources to many different species of birds insects. And this is proof of that for sure. Somewhere along our long hike today we logged dozens and dozens of Robins, many of them singing like it was springtime. I tried a number of times for a photo but they were always right above my head at the wrong angle. In this area one of our group spotted an Owl fly past but we never saw it again after some searching. The sun came and went today on a whim every 10-15 minutes or so. When it happened to be out I noticed this bright red male Cardinal going for the very last berry on this tree. A sight for sore eyes to see some color again after such a dreary month of December. Someone told me that we had just 2 days of sun in the entire month of December. But with yesterday and today that would now make 4. A stretch like that makes even seasoned Minnesotan's reevaluate why they live here! Finally when our group returned to the paved trail just north of 73rd, we stopped at the same place to watch the tweety birds. This is when I caught this House Finch snacking on a Buckthorn Berry. Yet another species in a growing list that I've seen eating Buckthorn Berries.