Category Archives: Birds

The raucous calls from above were LOUD, so I knew that the red-shouldered hawks were close.

There was one circling straight up over the neighbor’s yard, another calling from the trees about three houses down. It soon came up to joing this one.

The call is very distinct, as is the black & white pattern on top of the wings. Another thing that’s very noticable is how this hawk will be flapping its wings almost constantly, coasting and gliding on the thermals only a quarter to third of the time.

With these two about, it wasn’t more than a couple minutes before the red-tailed hawk pair showed up to reassert their domination and drive the red-shouldered hawk pair out of their territory.

Note the namesake red tail. This particular bird is also recognizeable as one of the locals due to the missing “V” of feathers near the tip of its right wing.

The red-tailed hawks will glide and soar for hours and have a black “bar” on the leading edge of the wing with a light colored lateral strip across the wings behind that. They’re also about a third or more larger than the red-shouldered hawks. Their call is the “traditional” hawk sound from every movie since the talkies started where the director wanted to establish the desert/Western scene with an audio cue. They’re also about a third bigger than their red-shouldered cousins.

It didn’t take the pair of red-tailed hawks very long to convince the red-shouldered pair that it was in their best interest to move on and find a territory elsewhere. Order was restored and we were back to listening to western towhees, house finches, mourning doves, and hummingbirds.

In the effort to catch one of the local hummingbirds in the golden sunset light, I often get photos that “miss” as they take off flit about, feed, fight, and harass each other.

It occurred to me that some of these “failed” photos actually had a certain beauty of their own, silhouettes of patterns both natural and artificial.

Part of it’s the light, but there’s also an element of a fractal design rendered in branch, stem, and leaf.

Perhaps these are the great pictures from that set and the ones with the annoying birds interfering with the patterns are the ones to toss.

It’s all a matter of perspective.

If only Little Bastard would share!

The feeder can easily handle eight or more hummers, but it’s rare to see two there because he chases them off. Very territorial!

I do wonder if the others are smart enough to gang up on him. It does seem that sometimes a half dozen or more will swoop in and take turns distracting him while the rest grab a quick bite. I have doubts that they’re really strategizing and planning. They’re beautiful to look at , but their brains are only theeeeeese 🤏🏻 big!

Of crows, of course!

Most sources say that you need three or more crows to constitute a murder. One is just a crow, two is just an attempted murder.

One source said you need at least four, since three is obviously just a CROWd…

Cheese it! The cops! Or, at least, that weird guy with the camera.

By any definition, we had enough. There were at least eighteen in the tree, plus another ten to fifteen soaring and circling above.

That tree is normally where the local Great Horned Owls hang out. This was just after sunset, so it’s not unlikely that there’s a connection. I’m sure those owls think that crows are good eatin’. If I’m a crow in the owls’ tree and they want it, I’ll find someplace else to perch!

Mockingbird.

I think it’s a juvenile. The coloration is a bit different than normal, but the Merlin app says it’s a mockingbird when it sounds off.

It might even be one of the fledgelings from the bush near our front door. They don’t, unfortunately, wear name tags.

This guy was judging me. I was getting a major stink eye exam and I got a strong vibe that I was not welcome in my own yard.

I finally left via the driveway in order to give them their space. It was not the kind of day when I needed a fledgling mockingbird trying to peck out an eye without any explanation. Discretion, valor, all of that…

For the first time this year we have a couple of nests on the front porch. There’s the mockingbird nest that seems to infuriate the red tail hawks, and the mourning dove nest up under the rafters. While the three mockingbird eggs hatched and the fledgelings were out of the nest and gone in a month, the mourning dove youngins seem perfectly happy to hang around.

Often there’s just the one.

But at the end of last week we started seeing a second one. One of these guys hit the front window late one night and then made quite the fuss sitting on the window sill. I warned him about the cats and raccoons that wander by the porch some nights, but it seemed unconcerned and was back up in the nest in the morning. Not my monkeys, not my circus!

The plan was to call these two Ben & Jerry. But then…

So… Manny, Mo, and Jack? Larry, Curly, and Shemp?

Close up there are enough differences in their markings to tell them apart. I do wonder if the one with the blue circle around their eye is the opposite sex from the two that don’t. I’m not enough of an expert on mourning doves to know, and I’m way too stinkin’ busy right now to take the time to research it.

What’s really funny is that when I go out the front door, the three of them all freeze. They’re moving enough to see that they’re alive, but it really does seem to be an instinctual response. HUMAN!  FREEZE! (Why is he talking to us? Are we supposed to understand or answer?) However, if I peek through the open drapes in the front window when they can’t see in, they’re shuffling about, grooming, fighting, and so on.

I’m going to try to not take it personally.

I had forgotten about these pictures!

Last month when I was in Winnipeg, I spent a couple of hours wandering around the parks along the Assiniboine River near the Manitoba Legislative Building. In addition to all of the geese that were there, I spotted a pair of large birds on the wing.

They were up high, and there were some tall buildings around so I kept losing sight of them.

It was a grey and gloomy day, just after some rain, but I managed to grab a couple of recognizable pictures.

The ever so wonderful Merlin Bird ID app IDs them as American White Pelicans.

Along the shore down here in Southern California it’s not uncommon to see pelicans, but they’re usually Brown Pelicans. These must be their cousins.

The main thing that made me doubt at first that they were pelicans is that the Brown Pelicans are almost never seen away from the ocean shore. They don’t do rivers and lakes. Not so the American White Pelican. They’ll go anywhere there’s water and fish.

I heard the red-tailed hawks calling on Thursday and went out, expecting to find a pair circling out over Valley Circle. Instead I found two pairs. They were off a ways so I just watched until one pair again landed in this tall Italian cypress tree. It’s the same tree where a hawk (quite possibly one of these two) was sitting before swooping down right next to me to attack the mockingbird nest by our front door. I’m wondering now if the other two hawks that were originally with this pair weren’t their offspring from this nest this spring – but I digress.

I couldn’t help but noticing that in front of me on the wires bringing power, internet, and phone to the neighborhood there were a half dozen or more big, fat mourning doves, as well as a few mockingbirds and that Cassin’s Kingbird that I finally ID’d. Since the hawk pair had apparently been hunting and I hadn’t seen them bring anything back to the (presumed) nest, I was thinking that if I were one of those big, fat mourning doves, I might be more worried about the presence of those two big, fast, hungry hawks.

The mourning doves however either knew something I didn’t (possible!) or are just really stupid (probable!) and didn’t pay any attention at all. I’ve seen one get taken out by a hawk several times from a perch on these wires, it’s spectacular. The hawk tucks and goes into a high-speed dive like a fighter jet, extends its talons at the last second, and *poof!*, they’re half a block away in a heartbeat and all that’s left is a cloud of feathers drifting toward the ground. A real world “sneak pass,” just with more fatal results for the mourning dove than the crowd at an airshow gets from that Navy Blue Angel F-18 that you lost track of.

One of the hawks (the male?) finally launched off down into the canyon, presumably to bring back an unsuspecting squirrel or dove.

I hope if we end up finding our “forever home” soon up in the high desert or Antelope Valley we have a nice assortment of birds there as well, particularly the raptors.