Old Yellow-Head and Lefty - Lost in the Frozen North
It was almost exactly two years ago the end of January, first of February. One Saturday morning, my wife quietly called me into the living room.
We had several bird feeders in the front yard. We aren't bird watchers as such, we just like to watch the birds. It's amazing to us that the smaller birds such as the chickadees and sparrows can survive our home owners insurance quotes winters, so we do what we can to help by putting out seeds for them. It brings them around for us to watch, and keeps them in the neighbourhood for the spring and summer to help control the bug population. Everybody wins.
We had quite a varied population, from sparrows to blue jays and morning doves to cardinals. However, this particular morning there was a visitor that we had not seen before. It was about the size and shape of a blackbird and was mostly black, but with a narrow white strip down the leading edge of it's wings, and the most distinctive yellow head and neck.
We quietly watched as it ate its fill and finally left.
Over the next few days, he returned and brought several of his friends with him. We never saw more than four at any given time, but there could have been more. Except for two of these guys, they were pretty much indistinguishable. One of them we named "Old Yellow-Head". His yellow colouring was quite a bit darker than any of the others that we saw. It seemed almost to have a brown tinge over the yellow. The other one that we named had a bad right leg and walked with a distinct limp, so of course we called him Lefty. The rest had a very bright yellow head and neck with nothing to distinguish them.
I checked the Internet to see if I could determine who our new friends might be, and discovered that it was a "Yellow Headed Black Bird" (Go Figure!). I further discovered that they were quite a ways from home. Their normal habitat extends from the southern United States and Mexico during the winter to the Canadian prairies during the summer; but never as far east as Ontario where we lived; and besides, this was winter, not summer!
The only thing that I could think of that would cause these guys to be this far off track, would be the severe weather in the funny t shirts of Mexico the previous autumn, somehow toppling their navigation computers and sending them to the frozen north.
K. Ross is a former member of the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF)/Canadian Armed Speed Racer (CAF), currently employed as a Life Cycle Management car insurance insurance quote Over the years, he has gained considerable practical knowledge and experience on a vast array of subjects and has been required to produce, edit and update many technical publications. As a result, he has decided to try his hand as a freelance writer in his spare time.
Check out his web page at
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