Some Recent Feeder Visitors

House Wrens and Carolina Wrens have both been singing madly around my home for the past few days. The House Wrens appear to be using two nestboxes on the property. One male controls both boxes, and I have seen him with another silent wren at each. It is not clear to me whether he has one partner (with the other box a dummy nest) or two (with nests in both). I suppose it is also possible that he does not have a mate yet. In any case, I am hoping that there will be baby House Wrens in the near future.

The last two days I set up my BirdCam at water dishes. Below are some of the better results. Using a motion-sensitive camera makes it easy to get the lens close to the birds, but difficult to control lighting or a bird's position at the time of exposure.

Some Common Grackles:

An American Robin:

A Blue Jay:

A Gray Catbird:

A bathing House Sparrow:

The last is a House Sparrow with a very short tail. It is either an adult who lost all its tail feathers (either to a predator or molt) or a young bird whose feathers have not fully grown in. I think the former more likely because the other feather groups seem normal.

More BirdCam photos are available at my Flickr account.

A Bathing White-throat

Now that April is drawing to a close, we will not have our winter visitors, the White-throated Sparrows, with us for much longer. So to honor their impending departure, here is a series of scenes from a sparrow taking a bath.





All photos taken with the Birdcam. More at Flickr.

Finch Photos

Since I do not get tired of Carduelis finches, here are a few that visited the feeders on Thursday. All are cropped from Birdcam images.





As always, more are available on Flickr.

Fight!

More feeder birds here.

Just Hanging On

Also from Monday's batch.

Busy Feeders

There was a lot of activity at the feeders yesterday. The morning and afternoon snowstorms seemed to keep the flocks coming.




Siskins are still around.

Note: Photos are not necessarily in chronological order.

Some New Feeder Birds

The feeders were busy again yesterday when we got another dose of snow.

First off, an unusual thistle customer...

The Pine Siskins were back.

At times, finding a place to land on the feeder was a problem.

These photos were all taken with a Wingscapes BirdCam yesterday. You can find more at my Flickr site.

House Sparrow Pool Party

House sparrows in a ground-level bird bath.

Bird Drinking Styles

Most birds drink by filling their mouth with water and then tilting their heads back to swallow. This common grackle, for example, tilts its head back.

Mourning dove is one of the few species with the ability to swallow without tilting back.

Birdcam Videos

My Birdcam took these two videos recently. They are both set at a ground-level birdbath. The bath itself is simply a shallow ceramic plate, nothing fancy.

First, a mourning dove.

Second, a hatch-year robin.


If the embedded videos will not play, you can find the mourning dove here and the robin here.

Baby Birds!

There has been a lot of breeding activity in my neighborhood lately. I can see the location of a catbird nest from my bedroom window. (I cannot see the nest itself, just the bush where the nest is located, and the constant activity of the the male and female flying in and out of the bush.) There are also a lot of fledglings begging for food. The ones I have noticed most are common grackles, but other common species are represented, too. Here are a few photos of them, courtesy of the Birdcam.

Juvenile grackle at a birdbath

Juvenile robin lifting a leaf

Juvenile robin bathing

There are more recent images at my Flickr account.

Something's missing

A short-tailed (common) grackle at the birdbath.

Most birds molt feathers a few at a time, so that no group is entirely unrepresented at any given time. I suspect that this grackle lost its tail in a narrow escape from a predator, possibly a neighborhood cat.

Drinking Doves

These three doves were among the many birds that visited the birdbath recently.

Bump

One of the mourning doves hanging around the yard has a strange growth on the top of its head. It is visible in the Birdcam image below. At first I thought that it was just a few misaligned feathers, but the bump appeared to keep its shape as the bird moved around. The cere seems a bit misshapen also. Any ideas about what it is?

Goldfinches on a Bag

Chippies and Junco

Chipping Sparrows have returned in a big way the past few days. Today there were several in the yard, and many were singing. Dark-eyed Juncos have also been singing and acting very aggressively towards each other.

There are only a few weeks each year when these two species might occupy the same photograph.

At least that is the case in Central Jersey. In the DC area, some Chipping Sparrows will stay all winter.

Molting Goldfinches

Spring brings a dramatic burst of song and color. With migratory songbirds the change is dramatic. Birds that we last saw in the drab olive and brown of fall suddenly return in a dazzling palette of red, orange, yellow, and blue.

For resident birds that stayed through the winter, such as American goldfinches, the change is more gradual. Birds molt only a few feathers at once, so it takes some time to shift plumages. In the meantime, we see birds in all stages of molt. Some, like the male below, appear to be mostly in breeding plumage.

This male (on the left) is a bit more patchy.

The bird on the right in the image above appears to be a female in the midst of transition. The female below (also on the right) seems to be mostly in winter plumage.

The male in this photograph also appears to retain some of his winter plumage. The changing plumages make for a great deal of variety, especially if you try to figure out each bird's sex. The return of the goldfinches' bright yellow is a promise of more bright colors to come when warblers and orioles arrive.

Birdcamming - Recent Visitors

After deserting the feeders for the last two months of last year, the birds have suddenly returned in large numbers again. House sparrows are still mostly absent, but others are coming back.

There have been house finches and dark-eyed juncos...

...and cardinals...

...and wrens...

...and mourning doves.

One of the squirrels managed to open a suet feeder and run off with the cake, which was still fairly large when I last saw it.

Top 10 Nature Moments of 2007

Tai Haku, who writes the Earth, Wind & Water blog, challenged fellow nature bloggers to name their own top 10 nature moments of 2007. The theme has since been taken up on many other blogs, so it is time for me to do it.

Here are my top ten, listed chronologically.

1. Watching eastern phoebes and black-capped chickadees in the snow on the C&O Canal.
2. A day for "little brown jobs" around the Mall and Hains Point.
3. Welcoming the early spring migrants at Hughes Hollow.
4. My first visit to the wetlands at Poplar Point, when I saw my 200th species in D.C.
5. Listening to barred owls in Rock Creek Park.
6. Discovering the Franklin Township grasslands sites (and their avian inhabitants).
   
7. Listening to the grunting of harbor seals at Bolinas Lagoon in California.
8. The visit my sister and I made to Jamaica Bay to look for shorebirds.
   
9. Seeing clapper rails and an American bittern at dusk at Sandy Hook.
10. Finding lots of white-crowned sparrows (and a Nelson's sharp-tailed sparrow) at Sandy Hook.

Do you have favorite nature moments from 2007? If so, please share them in the comments (or on your own blog).

Meanwhile, I have already seen my first birds of 2008. The very first was a dark-eyed junco. (These photos were taken a couple days ago with the Birdcam.)


Happy New Year!

Wren at the Feeder

Carolina wrens eat mostly arthropods, but this week one was coming to the sunflower feeder for a supplement.

A junco tried the sunflower feeder, too.