Category Archives: Birds

At first, I just saw two or three large feathers on the back porch. No big deal.

Then there were a couple more on the sidewalk. Again, no biggie.

It was only after I had done my lap around the back yard and got back to this point that my brain started to register all of the other feathers, well hidden by their coloration matching the dirt. Aside from the two on the sidewalk, how many can you find on the dirt? (I’ve got eleven so far, but every time I look I seem to find more.)

Now that my stupid brain knew what to focus on, I started spotting them all over a circle about ten feet across. Sometimes when this happens I see far, far more, but I think it depends on whether the mourning dove was in the air or on the ground, how high the hawk or owl was diving from, and whether the predator ate here or just made the strike and then took its meal off elsewhere to eat or feed its chicks.

The tiny, fluffy feathers all around the right side of the sprinkler head at the bottom were the confirmation for me. The bigger feathers can sometimes shed naturally, particularly if one of the big, fat mourning doves goes crashing into the sliding glass door. (They can really make a “thud” that echoes through the house!) But for there to be a handful of those finer (insulating?) feathers from underneath the big flight feathers, something violent needed to happen.

The hawk or owl (and possibly their chicks) eat today, while we’re one mourning dove down. Circle of life and all of that. We have a handful of hawks and owls in the neighborhood – we have dozens and dozens of mourning doves every morning when The Long Suffering Wife casts her bounty of bird seet upon her adoring throngs of feathered friends. (She’s like Snow White out there…)

We have several pairs (I’m assuming, they always seem to hang out two at a time) of California towhees that stay in the yard year around.

They’ll fly in and out and fly up into the bushes and trees when I get too close, but without a direct threat they seem to prefer hopping and running. They remind me of tiny roadrunners.

Most of them also seem to be acclimated to me much more than the other birds in the yard (mockingbirds, mourning doves, juncos, house finches) and they’ll let me get within ten feet easily before running or flying away.

What’s hilarious is when I throw grapes out into the yard – they’ll flock down to grab some before the evil squirrels get them all. If left alone, they’ll peck at the grapes and eat them bit by bit on the ground where they are, but if they see me or the squirrel (or the new neighbors’ dog) they’ll stab the grape with that bill, pick it up (despite the fact that it might be as big as their head), and then run like hell for the bushes where their nests are. It’s extremely comical.

This view shows you what the bird apps refer to as its “rich cinammon tones on face and orange undertail coverts.” I think from the scale of the hose on the first picture you can see that they’re bigger than the finches and juncos, smaller than the mourning doves, about the size of a robin or mockingbird.

Grapes, anyone?

Holy crap, look at the time!

Quoth the raven, “WHAT THE FUCK!?”

Yep, I went there!

I knew that they were around – the wonderful Merlin app had identified their song fairly regularly. But I had never caught one of them on camera, and I was iffy on whether or not I had seen them. They’re small, quick, flitting all over, and they’re usually way, way up in the top of that huge tree in the back yard.

Until today.

Meet the Lesser Goldfinch. I think the “lesser” part refers to their size – they’re less than 1/2 the size of the house finches in the yard, so I suspect there’s a bigger cousin (the American Goldfinch) out there someplace.

I was over in the corner of the yard, trying to track down a completely different and unusual bird song that I didn’t recognize, when this guy went off with his bird song, not five feet over my head. It was nice enough to sit still for about 30 seconds so I could snap off a few pictures, then flew up to the top of the tree.

Once I knew what to look for, I realized there were 4-6 of them up there. They move around a lot and they’re not very big, barely bigger than the hummingbirds that were also up there, but since the tree is pretty barren of leaves at the moment, I was able to watch them for a while.

Cool! And if there are 4-6 of them, with luck we’ll soon have more! It’s that time of year!

It’s that time of year.

Normally Little Bastard, the dominant hummingbird, sits here on my really excellent stick, but over the past week or so, more and more these two have muscled him out of the way to perch and display.

The male on the left is fully into his bright red, spring mating plumage, and the female on the right spends a lot of time evaluating potential nesting sites. We have a couple dozen pairs of house finches in the yard, with at least three nests already being built and occupied up under the eaves of the front and back porches. Plus god knows how many juncos, hummingbirds, crows, ravens, hawks, and the everpresent flocks of mourning doves.

But these two in particular are currently the most brazen and LOUD. It’s not that I dislike house finch songs, but they tend to star up about an hour before sunrise and then never shut up. I don’t care how beautiful, care free, and joyful a sound it is, at 05:00 AM it’s not that welcome.