Red in The Morning Sailors Take Warning!

 When I was a kid I used to go fishing with my father in a small aluminum boat. As we made our way out of the mouth of the Connecticut River and entered the Long Island Sound, my father would look out at the sky and say "Red at night, sailors delight-red in the morning, sailors take warning!" I don't know how accurate that saying is but it's a saying that sticks with me till this day. The photo above is the sky as it looked at 6am this morning (probably closer to fuchsia than red).

 It's currently sleeting as I'm writing this post at 5pm so maybe the morning sky was a predictor of the afternoon weather?

The morning started out okay. It was a little cold and damp for this time of the year with temperatures in the 40's. Not cold enough to discourage a Song Sparrow to pop up and say hello but cool enough for me to make my birding trip a short one.

 I visited a tiny, local nature park. I thought my glasses were dirty when I first uploaded this picture then realized I must have clicked on some sort of photo filter. I decided to just leave it instead of going back to fix it.

I believe the Carolina Wren is the culprit behind many of the inquiries I get about the source of a mysteriously loud bird song.  They are only about 5" long and weigh less than an ounce but you would swear there was a bird blowing a bugle in the backyard when you hear it sing. Here is a link from Cornell Lab of Ornithology to an excellent site called All About Birds: and here is a direct link on their site which includes a sound sample of a singing male Carolina Wren.