The weather is still not cooperating for fungi and mushroom hunting. Nor is it cooperating for macro photography in general with pretty routine winds of 10-20 mph and sometimes gusts that are 30-40 mph. It’s been that way for weeks - either sunny and cold/windy or rainy and warm/windy, but very few nice days to hunt macro shots. And if they are nice, I’m at work.

So I’ve been going home and opening the window where my camera is set up so that I can block out the world and watch the birds. The orioles are abundant, the baby red-bellied woodpeckers have flown the nest and are visiting the feeders (the male has been all over all of them and is the one that would eat a little suet and then raise his beak straight up and just wait that way for several seconds at a time like he was still waiting on his mama to feed him, but he figured it all out), catbirds are eating as much jelly as the orioles, a red-headed woodpecker surprised me and, much to my delight, has been around every day as long as I have bark butter on the tree trunk, a juvenile male rose-breasted grosbeak stopped by for a few evenings, no activity on the hummingbird feeder yet except for the orioles to use it as a perch, and the starlings have descended like the pests they are to lay the feeders bare within hours. It has been a challenge to keep them at bay (no pictures, I refuse). It’s supposed to be warm with rain this weekend and I am hoping to find some fungi or mushrooms growing in my woods.