I was talking with my brother about our neighborhood over the weekend. Mainly, I told him about how active with one another we tend to be: neighborhood bbq’s, house / pet watching, rides here and there, jam and jelly parties, etc… Walnut’s a lot like neighborhood’s many of us grew up in back in the 50’s and 60’s.
(Perfect example:
As I drove up to our house yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to see 5 bicycles in the front yard of a neighbor and, when I drove into our driveway, the kids were running from their backyard, up the porch and into the house – laughing and carrying on the whole way… it was great to see them doing things together outside and having fun.)
Anyway, as we were talking about all the activities / coming’s and going’s in the neighborhood, our conversation turned to the Parrots and Hawk pictured in an earlier post. In turn, that led to my telling him about the Osprey in a neighbor’s tree 2+ years ago. (Short version… as short as I can make it, anyway)
Back in May of ’05, we were out working in the backyard back one weekend afternoon. (Like it always starts…) Suddenly there was a tremendous amount of crow noises coming from “over there” (big house next to us) and when I looked up, I saw there appeared to be an Osprey in the neighbor’s tree being harassed by a small flock of crows.
Hey, that’s not nice!
Thinking “photo-op”, I ran, errr, ambled with purpose, to grab my camera /telephoto lens. By the time I returned to the back yard, the crows had been joined in their efforts by what appeared to be a robin. (“Bad Robins of Campbell?” huh?)
Apparently the osprey’d had about enough of this and began shifting about the top of the tree, eventually taking flight. I was able to shoot a rapid sequence of 5 frames and, as you can see from the pic, the poor bird was just settling in to enjoy a bite of fast food (trout are very fast) it’d picked up at the Perc Ponds when the crows (and robin) decided the osprey needed to eat someplace else. I’m not sure where the osprey went, but it’s quite likely it returned to the relative quiet of the Perc Ponds.