{"id":223,"date":"2009-03-14T02:35:06","date_gmt":"2009-03-14T02:35:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/bologs\/vng\/bird-of-the-week-red-winged-blackbird\/"},"modified":"2009-03-14T02:35:06","modified_gmt":"2009-03-14T02:35:06","slug":"bird-of-the-week-red-winged-blackbird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/bird-of-the-week-red-winged-blackbird\/","title":{"rendered":"Bird of the Week: Red-winged Blackbird"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.birds.cornell.edu\/AllAboutBirds\/BirdGuide\/Red-winged_Blackbird.html\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"media\/redwing.jpg\" width=\"230\" height=\"327\" class=\"illustration\" style=\"float:right;\" alt=\"red winged blackbird\" \/><\/a>From now on, as well as the usual cobblers that make up this blog, every week I&#8217;m going to try and nominate a bird for the &#8220;Bird of the Week&#8221; and this week is the beautiful <a href=\"http:\/\/www.birds.cornell.edu\/AllAboutBirds\/BirdGuide\/Red-winged_Blackbird.html\">Red-winged Blackbird<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>We first became aware of this beautiful little guy last year during our drive to work. We noticed a bunch of odd little birds flying across the road at the same point of our journey every day, but flying in a most peculiar way; rather than just flying in a straight line they give a little burst of wing flapping, which caused them to gain altitude, followed by a short glide, during which they drop again. It gives them a sort of sawtooth flight pattern. On a few occasions they flew close enough for us to notice that they had red go-faster stripes on them.<\/p>\n<p>Once we&#8217;d managed to identify these lovely little guys, we noticed from the pictures that rather than go-faster stripes, the red markings are actually more like the epaulettes of some dodgy military dictator &#8211; right down to the gold trim. <\/p>\n<p>Over the winter we haven&#8217;t seen them at all and were beginning to wonder whether we&#8217;d imagined them&#8230;until last week. <\/p>\n<p>Waiting over the road from my office, at the bush that designates the bus-stop, I noticed a swarm of odd little birds. They flew past me into the distance and then, two minutes later they appeared behind me and flew past again &#8211; all the time in a peculiar sawtooth flight pattern. This went on for about ten minutes before I realised&#8230;the red-wings are back! Now that the temperature is rising, they&#8217;ve come back to make babies and hang out in Philly!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From now on, as well as the usual cobblers that make up this blog, every week I&#8217;m going to try and nominate a bird for the &#8220;Bird of the Week&#8221; and this week is the beautiful Red-winged Blackbird. We first became aware of this beautiful little guy last year during our drive to work. We [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}