Falling from the sky.....

We drove over to Henderson, KY to the Sauerheber Refuge, yesterday to see if the annual migration of Snow Geese had arrived.

Yep!.....there were a "few" there :-)  This is one of the highlights of the birding year for me.  There are 1000's of Snow Geese, Greater White-fronted Geese, and ducks that stop here every winter to spend a few months at this safe preserve.  They seem to know exactly where the boundaries are and stay out of the hunter's fields.  

 This may look like a flock of starlings or other blackbirds, but in reality they are all geese.  Large numbers of them decided to take to the air and change their location in the field while we were watching.  What a sight it is to see this many geese in the air at once!

 A distant shot to give the feel of the size of the swarm.  I wish I could post these full size, but Blogger won't allow me to do that any more.

 I did a lot of multi-shot rapid shooting and just let the birds stream by.  Wow...what fun!  (I took over 1000 photos before we left.  I didn't even realize how many I was taking!)

I got a lot of landing shots that way and that is where my title comes from.

 It looked like it was raining birds....they were "falling from the sky!

 Actually they were just landing, but it just had that feel of birds floating down like rain (or snow :-)

Not too many close shots....they were too far away.  But here are some of the mix....Snow Geese in both color patterns and White-fronted Geese.
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This refuge is part of a large Wildlife management area.  A large number of acres along the road are protected from October to March from hunters, and 1000's of water fowl will spend the winter there. This is a wonderful place to visit if you are anywhere near enough to visit! Viewing is not always good depending on where the geese are hanging out, but sooner or later you find some of them in the flooded fields along the road, and there are some observation stands if you have really good camera equipment for long distances.

Enjoying a look at the past.....

The Airship Museum of yesterday's post was attached to another museum in an old train depot that looked at the history of the area around Pittsburgh, Tx.

The building was an old depot that had been restored

 The local shootout :-)

 Memorabilia from the history of the railroad

 Cotton

 Chicken farming

Nice old tractor

 Fireless Cooker from 1912

Old stove

 I remember desks like this one

Mike was interested to learn that Carroll Shelby lived in the area.

I'm having trouble with posts again and the space issues.  I have had to shrink these photos down in size even more and putting a post together is becoming quite a chore.  Not happy about this.  May be starting new blog soon.  Will post a link if I do.

Ezekiel Airship Museum....

I don't have any bird photos to post at the moment, so I thought I would post a few more things from our Texas trip.  When leaving Texas, we passed through a small town....Pittsburgh, TX....and saw a sign pointing the way to the "Ezekiel Airship Museum".  Huh????  What is that?  We were curious enough to stop and find out!

It the early 1900's, before the Wright Brothers took their flight at Kitty Hawk, a Baptist preacher-inventor in this town claims to have built and flown an airship first.  Rev. Burrell Cannon, after reading the book of Ezekiel, thought he understood what the "wheel within a wheel" was all about and designed and built this airship.  

 This is a full scale model of the original.  The whole story of the design and building of this was really interesting and if you want to know more go here.

It was a fascinating place to visit and see this.  Whether the claim to early flight is true or not......uncertain.

I'll post some more photos from another history museum on the same site in my next post.

My favorite backyard visitors....

I happen to look out the sliding glass doors the other day just in time to catch a few of my favorite little birds at the feeders.  The maple leaves hadn't fallen yet, so they made a pretty backdrop.

The Chickadee is so fast I only caught one visit from him. 

 The Downy was checking for bugs in the limb we cut off as well as trying the feeder.

 I was thrilled to see the Red-breasted Nuthatch!  Such a quick little bird!  There were two of them out there.

 I'm so glad they like this hanging ball and hope the raccoons will leave it alone.

 They can climb all over it, so when the seeds get low, they still get food.

 The Titmouse is always so cute.  

The cut limb makes a good place to stop and open the seed. 

The White-breasted Nuthatch showed up that morning, too! 

I love all these little birds and was so glad to see them getting some seed instead of all the House Sparrows eating everything in sight.  I think being gone for a week in Texas, made a few of the sparrows go away...at least temporarily!