Bird Sightings 2014 - 2015

[digitS']

Mary, you have the water close by so there must be lots of waterfowl and shore birds. I don't really know the Bay Area . . .

Look up, violet-green swallows and others up there, diving & darting?! Red-tail hawk circling . . ? Sharp-shinned hawk cruising thru the trees & streets looking for a pigeon dinner or a sparrow snack? Easy to mistake him for a pigeon - I'm sure he benefits from that!

Look for song sparrows - they will work their way under bushes on the ground and the English sparrows better leave 'em alone or the male song sparrow will assert his native rights! They don't look a lot different but see that dark "thumb-print" on his throat and listen for his song!

House finches? They like us, too! They lived in the mountains of northern Mexico and on into New Mexico but couldn't get across the treeless plains and deserts until . . . we carried them! Yeah, the story is that they were taken as cage birds to the East Coast, escaped and have moved right across the country with us in our communities. The English sparrows bully them so they are likely to be up on the telephone lines, singing! Listen for the songs - English sparrows do nothing but chatter.

Put out thistle seeds - not millet - see if the finches show up. There may be more finch species than the house finch at your feeder.

Steve

 

[ninnymary]

Steve, we do have seagulls. Do those count? and pigions. No fancy birds here. Definitely no songbirds. Oh, I have heard woodpeckers and saw one once. I guess we have a few.

Mary

 

[TheSeedObsesser]

Crows are actually my favorite birds, couldn't tell you why, I just like them.

As for the sparrows, all that they do is beat around the other birds (the house sparrows) and scratch mulch up looking for seeds. But they're here and have been here for a long time, they're never leaving, so might as well enjoy them for what they're worth.

Do you have Chimney Swifts?

 

[digitS']

I kind of like spunky birds. A crow has all the spunk of an entire flock of pigeons. Maybe it's because they are such large birds but it is easy to see that ravens play and tease each other. An English sparrow flew so close to me a day or 2 ago that it touched my arm.

Flycatchers will build their nests far out on a pinetree branch as tho defying any predator to come anywhere near it.

Allaboutbirds.com tells me it is the white-throated swifts that live in desert canyons in the Wild West.

Steve
edit: sorry, that's allaboutbirds.org

 

[ninnymary]

SeedO, I don't even know what chimney swifts are. Oh, I once saw a hawk on my fence and we do have hummingbirds! Our birds here are starting to add up.

Mary

 

[Carol Dee]

SeedO, I don't even know what chimney swifts are. Oh, I once saw a hawk on my fence and we do have hummingbirds! Our birds here are starting to add up.

Mary

I bet if you really looked closely some of those sparrows are fich! Keep looking around. You probably have a much wider variety than you 1st thought!

 

[JimWWhite]

I can't say I've seen them but there are multiple yellow-billed cuckoo birds in the woods around us. They were at one time on the endangered species list but I think they made a comeback in recent years. My Mama used to call them rain crows because of their call. I went to a web site that had the bird calls where you could play them and sure enough that's what they are. Kind of like a mourning dove, but different. You can hear them calling to each other from two, sometimes three places in the woods during the day, usually early in the morning before it warms up very much.

 

[thistlebloom]

I like crows too @TheSeedObsessor.
We had a pet crow for about a year when my boys were little. He was great fun! He was a free bird but hung around the house most days. If he was at a neighbors visiting while we were gone he would always fly home when he saw our jeep coming down the road and would be on the front porch to greet us.

 

[so lucky]

Mary, what kind of hummingbirds do you have there?

 

[Lavender2]

@ninnymary - California ebird is a cool site. You can click on the (map) button and find exactly where the birds have been observed. If you feed them, they will come.