Well it’s a new season. New birds. Let’s do it again.
Five minutes watching my bird feeder (with my cats*) and I get:
Sparrows
Purple finches
Starlings
Mourning doves
and the random Cardnial and Blue jay.
*we have a floor to ceiling balconey door. Charlie (the cat) hasn’t figured it out yet. Everyonce in a while will get too excited and run head long into it. Not the sharpest claw on the paw.
The purple finches are pretty cool, but I miss the chickadees.
You?
Well, right now it’s dark…
But in the past couple of days: lots of woodpigeons, crows, starlings, blackbirds, a couple of robins, and housemartins. And I have in the past spotted an owl, a kingfisher and several herons all just outside my house (living near woods and a river helps!)
I just saw a bluebird on my lunchtime walk.
There’s a house finch nest with three (possibly four) almost-ready-to-fledge babies; starlings, orioles, and sparrows in my yard.
Woodpeckers, cardinals, robins, sparrows, geese, turkey vultures, ducks, blue jays, chickadees. A few others I don’t know the names of.
The common ones I see in my yard:
Goldfinches
Purple finches
Chickadees
White-breasted nuthatches
Red-breasted nuthatches
Juncos
brown creepers
Downy woodpeckers
Hairy woodpeckers
The occasional Pileated woodpecker
Lots of seagulls overhead
Turkey vultures
A sapsucker, once
Bluejays
Crows
The occasional Great Blue Heron in the creek
A sandhill crane flying overhead, once
Penguins
OK, maybe not that last one. But I keep lookin’ for 'em in the winter.
Just robins, sparrows, goldfinches and purple finches. I can hear a cardinal, but can’t see him.
I’ve never seen a bluebird. I would love to see a bluebird.
Damn, looking out now I see nothing at all. Normally from my window I’d see pigeons, sea gulls, and the occasional starling. Once on an adjacent building I saw a red-tailed hawk eating one of the aforementioned.
But this morning on my way to work, I saw a pair of Canada geese with two fuzzy yellow goslings. Cuter than a button they were, though I know people’s feeling about Canada geese generally. Too bad, no picture!
We’ve got a house finch nest in the eaves over the patio; three of them flew off today.
We also get:
sparrows
chickadees (they’re friendly!)
goldfinches
titmice
European starlings
a grosbeak? (this one hops around on the ground, so I can’t see it very well)
bluejays*
cardinals*
woodpeckers*
mourning doves
robins
Cooper’s hawk (occasionally hangs out in the trees across from my patio)
crows
geese (the apartment complex behind mine has a decorative pond that attracts them)
(* I had to purchase a new bird feeder recently due to a squirrel problem, and the perches on it are too small to support these birds properly.)
From my vantage point I can see only a couple of mourning doves, but there’s a kamikaze crow that’s currently living in a tree that stands between this building and our building across the street. He swoops down on everyone that walks by, cawwwwwwing his warning.
Ravens, mockingbirds, night herons, parrots, finches, sparrows, starlings, pigeons, pelicans, seagulls, terns, cormorants, phoebes, hawks, kestrels, towhees.
And occasionally, for some reason, a pair of macaws.
Well, none right now, but there are peregrine falcons in the neighborhood this time of year and I see them perch on one of the nearby buildings sometimes. And on my desktop is a webcam feed from a pair of red-tailed hawks with two chicks nesting somewhere on the MIT campus.
I just posted in my blog about all of the birds I have been seeing.
Yesterday I saw:
Merlin
Hen pheasant
Barn swallows
Cardinal
Sandhill cranes
Canada geese
Gadwall drake and 2 hens
European Starlings
Mourning Doves
Bluebirds
Robin
Ah, one of the great joys of living in Florida.
Common birds
Mockingbirds
Blue Jays
Cardinals
Mourning Doves
Sparrows
Assorted woodpeckers
Assorted LBBs*
Fish Crows
cattle egrets
Not so common birds
Ospreys
Red Tailed Hawk (one very bold individual has taken to loitering on our fence.)
Turkey Vultures
Sand Hill Cranes
Ibises
Wood Storks
Great Horned Owl
One errant Mayberry whistling cockatiel who is now an indoor squatter.
That’s just around the house. Many other species in environments within driving distance.
*LBBs = Little Brown Birds I can’t identify, usually various songbirds
Daily basis:
Starlings
Pigeons
Crows
Anna’s Hummingbirds
House finches
House sparrows
Seagulls (never bothered to figure out which kind)
Barn swallows
Black capped chickadees
Bushtits
Steller’s jays
American robins
and Peacocks (I work at the zoo; they roam free)
Not everyday, but frequent flyovers:
Bald eagle
Osprey
GBH
Flicker (again, not sure which)
lissener, that would be a red-shafted flicker. If you see a red teardrop shape on its cheek, then it’s a male. Both males and females have red underwings that are quite noticable in flight. Red-shafteds live in the western US while the yellow-shafteds (which are similar except for the color of the teardrop and underwings) stick to the east. The Audubon Society now classifies both varieties under the name of northern flicker.
Until I opened this thread, there were several house sparrows dining on bagel bits on my patio. They make up about 90% of what I see back there. A chickadee or two stop by on a daily basis and dark-eyed (Oregon) juncos visit in the fall and winter.
Yesterday a Steller’s jay snatched a few peanuts while the squirrels weren’t looking. Last week, a white-crowned sparrow enjoyed the patio’s amenities for several days before moving on north. Well, probably north, for the summer. Also, a pair of house or purple finches–I can never tell them apart–checked out the place a couple of times.
A red-shafted flicker occasionally lands on the corner of the building across the alley and crows land on its roof, I think to let me know that a peanut or chunk of bagel would taste very nice right about then.
I see hawks in the sky occasionally. Probably red-tailed, as they’re most common here. And bald eagles surf the updrafts, sometimes to the accompaniment of territorial crows.
Oh, and the swallows are back! I haven’t seen any close enough to see what kind they are but love watching and listening to them. I don’t think there’s another critter that captures the essence of joy the way a swallow does.
Oh, and there have been a couple of titmice stopping in these last few days. And the starlings are back in the neighborhood.
Dang! Bushtits, not titmice. :smack:
Pelicans and egrets. Some bluejays and doves. Lovely!
Last night some sort of swallow got trapped in my porch b/c the light was on. I’m pretty sure there’s a mated pair of them and a pair of mourning doves that live on my property. Starlings have nested in my porch roof.
There’s a group of crows that live in my yard and all hang out together. I call them The Street Gang. They have one bluejay that sometimes hangs with them who I call The Punk.
I’ve also seen recently:
pileated woodpecker
great horned owl
turkey vulture
some sort of hawk
chickadees
cardinal
wild turkeys