We have a pair of White Tailed Kites that appear to be breeding at my job site. Having public sex on the bare treetops and cavorting about. I got a barely passable shot of one of their fancy courtship displays, with the male handing a freshly caught meadow vole to a female in mid-air.
Rather less spectacularly I also saw a Purple Finch the other day, which may not seem that fancy, but it pleased me because for some reason I don’t run into them that often - it’s almost always House Finches around here. I’ve also been trying to get a decent shot of a Bewick’s Wren at one of my local botanical gardens the past couple of weeks, where they are quite commonly rummaging about in the shrubberies. But the little buggers have been annoyingly evasive, all my photos have been kinda crap.
We’re vacationing on Kauai this week. Lotsa cool birds here. The Red-Crested Cardinals are our favorites.
Back home (Seattle) it’s always fun to see our bald eagles. Once in a great while I’ll get excited to see a Pileated Woodpecker, too. (Apparently I have a thing for redheads!)
Looks like we got a Pileated Woodpecker moving around our place! Noticed one of the cats just staring intently at a tree and looked up and saw it. It was really neat to see, not often that you see woodpeckers.
When I was in college, it was very common for the student paper to run a story (with pictures!) about one of the local hawks devouring a squirrel in front of the library, or in the Brickyard…student foot traffic didn’t seem to bother them much at all. The rest of the campus had rather common birds; upon closer inspection, however, they were noticeably more plump than similar birds found off-campus.
I’ve been putting a lot of suet packs out lately; these seem to attract woodpeckers, wrens (I love the way they scoot up and down the trees), and crows. One intrepid little cardinal has decided to tackle the suet this year; his beak really isn’t suited for the task, but he works at the suet until a good-sized chunk drops to the ground. I’ve seen a female cardinal hanging out with him lately, so I guess he’s doing something impressive. Sometimes I’ll put some hot pepper oil sunflower seeds in the feeder; this attracts cardinals, titmice, goldfinches, chickadees, and various sparrows.
I haven’t seen any cool birds lately, but I’d LIKE to…
The big downside to my house is that I don’t have anywhere to be able to put any feeders and be able to see them. My house is built into a hill, and all the windows on rooms we use are second-story height. Anyone know of any good feeders that I can stick to the window or something? And that I can somehow mount from inside the house? (I considered hanging a hook over the window, but I wouldn’t be able to reach it from outside, and getting to it from the inside to refill and such would be a huge pain).
I’d never seen a cedar waxwing until a couple of years ago when a small group stopped in our yard on their way somewhere. What a sleek group of little bandits they appear! Then they came again the next year and our “resident hunter” made lunch of one.
The next year - no waxwings. I’m hoping they’ve forgotten by now. Pretty amazing how they avoided us.
Same with the occasional red tailed hawk. He’ll pick’em right off the feeder and then for a few days you won’t see a bird in the yard. Word gets around apparently.
I saw a Great Blue Heron on my way to the Stockton Courthouse this morning. Skimming over a canal. Beautiful. I saw a Bald Eagle last Oct/Nov just south of Napa. We have Burrowing Owls and all sorts of stuff on the edge of the Delta.
On my old neighbor’s dock, I go out and almost stumble across one tonight as he’s perched in the boathouse (my approach blocked by some wooden pilings). As I watch, he slowly extends his head and DIVES into the river and snags a fish! Silly git thinks he’s a kingfisher or osprey or something…
There are a few lightweightplastic feeders which attach to windows with suction cups. If you skip the heavier mixed feed that is full of cane and millet and instead use Niger thistle or Mammoth Gray Stripe sunflower you should have good luck with the suction cups.
We live above a nature preserve and often have creatures in our yard.
One day last summer I looked out the window and saw a Blue Heron standing by my pond, waiting. I opened the door and said, “Shoo, shoo!” He was so tame that he just looked at me like,“Pipe down, lady. Can’t you see I’m fishing here?”
So I had to walk toward him moving my arms and got quite close before he would budge.
Even then he just flew to the top of our fence and waited for me to go back in the house. We played this game for a while.
I’d never seen one so closely before and was surprised by his size and the beautiful blue shade of his feathers.
Cedar Waxwing two years ago. I’m born and raised in British Columbia and was surprised to learn that these birds are indiginous to the area…I’d never seen one before
Some years ago I discovered our resident robins don’t migrate. Instead, they hang out down at our local park and scatter themselves all over the soccer field when it’s sunny, above freezing, and little to no snow on the ground.
Our resident red tail family just started making loops over our neighborhood again. This afternoon one of them was cruising fairly low around my neighbors’ backyards. I’m wondering if it spotted an errant squirrel (I think this is the time of year squirrels give birth, IIRC).
The cardinals are back! I also thought I spotted a blue jay hiding in a spruce the other day. If it indeed was, he’s back rather early (they and the mockingbirds usually don’t show up until mid-late April at the earliest).
Every once in a while I’ll hear either flicker somewhere in the wooded area behind our local corner store. He’ll do the wicka-wicka-wicka then tap whatever he’s on. Last summer he decided someone’s garage was a dandy place. I’m presuming the owner thought otherwise.
The snowy egrets, sanderlings, and terns won’t be back at the nearby beach until May at the earliest.
My mother, when she couldn’t get outdoors anymore, used to love to watch the birds coming to her windowsill bird feeder. Not the same model but this one is similar. You can see out but the birds can’t see in. It’s easy to fill from inside the house. Her cat was absolutely mesmerized by it. The only downsides were the price, of course, and hers needed a bit of weatherstripping around it in the cold weather. It was very hard to keep squirrels out of too. Her window was on the second story of the building and the squirrel used to leap from the balcony over to the feeder. She used to put out bird seed mixed with chili pepper. It kept most of the fuzz balls out except for one who seemed to crave the heat. My brother claimed he could actually see the squirrel’s eyes water.
I mentioned in another thread that we have hoopoes living near our house. They raised a baby in a rain gutter of our roof, but baby seems to have left recently to make a life for him/herself.
I’ve never been any sort of bird watcher, but the hoopoes are elegantly beautiful, with a fannable crest etc. We have several other species on our plot of land, including a crow who lives in the orchard and occasionally makes intimidating swoops at us.
My government office is near a major river, and migrating birds use the river as a landmark so they often fly right over us. And the nature bird guys in their department let everyone know when something interesting flies over. So they alerted the entire department three weeks ago when on March fourth, thousands of cranes passed in long, sky-spanning V’s overhead our office. It was a clear sky and I could clearly hear their calls. .
I remember when I first came to Australia to live, and was disappointed that all the birds I’d seen thus far had been black, grey, or brown, with horrid crackly calls. And then a few minutes after I thought that, a rainbow lorikeet flew past.
Since then I have often seen things like cockatoos, galahs, rosellas, kookaburras, and there’s something blue-and-yellow that has flitted past my view a couple of times, that I haven’t managed to see close enough to know what the heck it is; I guess it may be a different kind of rosella.
They’re nice birds, and great to see, but around here aren’t all that unusual.
That looks like one of those illustrations of (hypothetical) brilliantly colored dinosaurs. Nice. Your location reads “Thailand”, which explains why I’ve never seen such a thing before.
At our backyard feeders (here in Missouri) we mostly get the same species year after year. The last thing we got excited about was an Eastern Towhee, and that was only because we’d never seen or even heard of the species before. I’m sure there are many places where they’re nothing noteworthy.
