Wild Farm Birds and Animals

We don't have many birds around the yard during the winter unless there's snow on the ground; then the little juncos just appear out of nowhere. But we do have large birds during the winter, such as Canadian geese, (this picture was taken last summer but they're here all winter

and then there's Edgar Allen Crow, (first picture) at the chicken house most mornings.

Recently, this hawk has been coming to the fence in back of the house almost every morning. On this morning, it was raining, and the hawk looked all puffed out and very wet.

Now and then it flies down and catches something (?)

Just this past week we've had bald eagles in the trees around the pasture.

Of course we've seen crows and hawks all of our lives; any farm wife knew hawks were a threat to her baby chickens or her laying hens. Crows were a nuisance in farmers' corn and
watermelon fields. But until a few years ago, the only time we would see geese was in the fall or spring as they flew overhead in their migration paths; bald eagles were only birds we had heard about or seen pictures of, so it's quite a thrill to be close to them.

There are other animals on the farm too that we didn't see when we were children: armadillos, deer, coyotes, and very rarely, a raccoon. Now these have become pests, making holes in the fields, eating flowers and garden plants, and, in the case of the raccoon, climbing the ladders of the feed bins at the chicken houses and going inside the bins with no way out. Sometimes we see as many as thirty deer grazing in the fields; Popa says when he was younger they had to go to the mountains to hunt deer. Pests or not, it's still somewhat thrilling to see them up close; that is all but armadillos and I'd be happy to never see another one.