It’s still dark so I’ll post the last ones seen out the window last evening. A cold snap came in with snow so larger groups came in at one time. I had 5 male Cardinals, and 4 female Cardinals near sunset. I’ll post after sunrise.
What birds do you see?
Oh man, I’d kill to see a cardinal!
I have a feeder and a suet cake outside my home office window. Here’s what I see just about every day lately:
I’ve also seen brown creepers on occasion, but only on the trees. They don’t come to the feeders.
At night, I get flying squirrels. I saw 2 at a time on Saturday night. They fly over to the windowsill and jump to the feeder. Very cute.
Right now, I can see a single Starling on a chimney-pot on the house opposite, and a Collared Dove on the TV antenna. Something else just flew in behind one of the other chimneys, but it settled where I can’t quite see it - probably another Collared Dove.
Wait! There’s a blackbird on the TV antenna too now and two more on the apex of the roof, and a gull of some sort just flew over, but they all look alike to me.
A cardinal, and if I stand up I can see a great blue heron stalking the canal.
I can hear chickadees, but can’t see the little guys. CHICK-a-dee-dee-dee.
My office overlooks a “creek,” so I get a lot of stuff moving through.
Permanent residents: Many doves and pigeons. Some sort of swallows that live in the drainage tunnel that feeds the creek. Occassionally a kingfisher.
Transients: 2 pairs of ducks. A couple of days a year a huge swarm of cedar waxwings. And twice, a yellow-crowned night heron.
Cardinals, crows, sparrows, doves. Farther away on the beach, gulls, swans, geese and other shore birds; loons in the spring. One male cardinal insists on charging the window repeatedly. A local bird expert says they are one of the most aggressive birds and he is probably challenging his reflection. But he doesn’t give up even though he must be pretty battered by now. I think he is evenly matched.
Sparrows and ring doves in the garden, occasionally blackbirds and starlings. We’re not far from a park with a large pond so we often get skeins of geese flying overhead.
I have a Vallum lapis outside my window, which greatly inhibits the other wildlife in the area. We have quite a population of pigeons, squirrels and 'possums, not to mention rats, though. (I’ve never, ever seen a wild rat, but the signs in our alley tell me the city is treating for them.)
My apartment overlooks the Bay of Panama, and I’m about a block from a city park, so I get a good range of species even though I’m in the middle of the city.
At the moment I can see:
Great Egret (about 25)
Snowy Egret
White Ibis
Black Vulture
Turkey Vulture
Laughing Gull
Tropical Kingbird
Great-tailed Grackle
Rock Pigeon (Rock Dove)
There are also some shorebirds that are too far away to identify.
Other species I regularly see or hear from my apartment:
Brown Pelican
Magnificent Frigatebird
Neotropic Cormorant
Whimbrel
Willet
Black-bellied Plover
Western Sandpiper
Royal Tern
Peregrine Falcon
Yellow-headed Caracara
Yellow-crowned Amazon (Parrot)
Orange-chinned Parakeet
Red-crowned Woodpecker
Gray-breasted Martin
Tropical Mockingbird
Clay-colored Thrush
Blue-gray Tanager
Palm Tanager
Crimson-backed Tanager
Streaked Saltator
During migration huge flocks of tens of thousands Turkey Vultures, Broad-winged Hawks, and Swainson’s Hawks pass by my apartment.
Nothing. Nada. I see some tree rats, but no birds. I suspect once the weather warms up I will see some sparrows and robins.
This morning I saw what seemed like a flock of robins outside my bedroom window. Its been very wet here so I guess they’re look for worms. Yesterday there was a PAIR of red tail hawks hanging out all day. I usually only see them one at a time so I thought this was pretty strange. I guess the rain made the hunting good for them too. We have a pair of cardinals that are here a lot. The male attacks one of the windows several times a day…on any given morning there could be a flock of Canadian geese on our pond or other visitor ducks, besides our own ducks, so I always look out to see who is visiting. A couple days a week there is a large blue herrin that sleep on the pond in the ducks house. I’ve noticed a larger than normal red fox (this one is actually yellowish) that is also bird watching…
About 500-600 Canadian Geese. Imagine the piles of poop they’re leaving out there!
From my 30th floor office in downtown Chicago, these are the birds I see most frequently. Pretty much every day. They nest on the building right behind ours.
A vulture…
Should I worry?
Nah, nothing that spectacular. Tits, and an occasional sparrow…
Oh, Colibri, I envy you each time I see your username.
Great Blue Heron, green heron, and kingfishers, wood ducks, and mallards around the creek.
These visit the feeders or the ground below and I see these every day: eastern bluebird, indigo bunting, evening grosbeak, blue jay, crow, robin, thrasher, mockingbird, towee, turkey, wren, cardinal, titmouse, chickadee, grass sparrow, house sparrow, house finch, goldfinch, nuthatch, yellow bellied sapsucker, hairy woodpecker, downy woodpecker, yellow bellied woodpecker.
All summer: kingbird, flycatcher, barn swallow, cliff swallow, bluebirds, mockingbirds, and cedar waxwings catch insects in the yard.
In or around the yard and field every day: The Cooper’s hawk also frequents the feeders- but not for the seed. Red tail hawk, screech owl, Great Gray owl, quail, grouse (hear them drumming in Spring, rarely see one) and a pair of Pilated woodpeckers. Last year a rose-breasted grosbeak pair stopped at the feeders during migration.
I am in the moutains in the Southeast inside city limits of a busy and polluted town, but I have a creek in my front yard, and mountains and open fields on all four sides. I feed thistle, gray mammoth sunflower, suet, and a millet and cane mix all winter, and I feed a little seed and hummingbirds in the summer.
When the feeder is empty, I see lots of sparrows (white-crowned, and a couple other varieties), lots of cardinals (I once saw six males at once!) and a bad-tempered bluejay. When the feeder is full, there are three white-breasted nuthatches, a pair of tufted titmice, and one lonely chickadee.
Rarely, I see a Northern flicker and a downy woodpecker. And last summer, a pair of red-tailed hawks nested in the neighborhood.
And I always hear mourning doves, but don’t see them.
At my place, just pigeons, aka “rats with wings”. At the place I used to live, only about four miles away in the Sydney suburbs, we’d get a lot of sulphur-crested cockatoos.
I have none out the window now. I’ve seen up to 43 ground doves near the feeder at once this winter. They still look like vultures when they sit in the flowering crab. I have some kind of sparrow that comes in as a flock of over 50 birds, and flit about for 15 minutes. Every car noise sends them into the air before they detremine it’s safe to land and eat again. I had four species of wood peckers in early winter. Two were around most of the winter, and none have showed up in two weeks. We had an eagle accross the river a few times in December. No real supprise. They hang out on the Wisconsin between Sauk City and Wisconsin Dells all winter, which isn’t too far to have one show up on the Fox. In the spring of 2006 we had a woodpecker that that the tv antena tower made a much better sounding board then a tree, to attract a mate.
Since I started feeding birds about 10 years ago I’ve seen maybe 30 species in the garden. The most common are:
House sparrows, great tits, blue tits, robins, blackbirds, collared doves, chaffinches, magpies, jackdaws, greenfinches and starlings.
Less frequently I see the occasional party of long-tailed tits, a coal tit, a great spotted woodpecker, a pheasant, the odd wren, a songthrush, a few goldfinches and a goldcrest. All the rest are rare sightings over the course of a decade.
This time of year we’ve got:
bluebirds
towhees
Carolina wrens (the weather was so warm over the weekend I left the back door open and even had one come in the house and perch on the ceiling fan in the living room for a bit)
sparrows
mourning doves
snowbirds
buzzards
hawks
brown thrashers
mockingbirds
geese
