qebo’s 2015-2016 birds

I’ve participated in FeederWatch the past two years, with feeders on the balcony of my city house. I’m in the process of moving, a mere 3/4 mile but to a house outside city limits with a grove of mostly native trees in the yard. I’ll be curious to see what’s different. Today I set up feeders on the deck. I’m not living at the new house net, nor is any furniture, so bird watching will be sporadic, but I’m often there during daylight hours on weekends.

Once you get your feeders set up, I'll be sure to fill mine more regularly. It will be fun to see which birds we have in common.

This week I've seen house sparrows in great abundance, a few mourning doves, a few cardinals, and two soaring turkey vultures. It's really interesting to see which birds use which trees and for what. Lately the sparrows are using the euonymus hedges for shelter, and the mourning doves like to sit quietly high up on the branches of the spruce tree.

Have fun birding!

I was there for awhile this morning, not gazing out the window continuously but checking every so often, and so far my only bird is an enterprising squirrel, the first to figure out what a feast has been provided.

As I sit at my desk typing, I can see Oregon juncos, a Stellar's jay, a pair of towhees, sparrows, pine siskins, a Northern flicker, and both black-capped and chestnut-backed chickadees. Ooh, a pair of evening grosbeaks just landed on my window feeder not two feet from me. An Anna's hummingbird landed in the weeping cherry on it's way to the hummingbird feeder which I can't see from my angle. Other daily visitors include pileated woodpeckers, downy and hairy woodpeckers, and banded-tailed pigeons (they usually do an afternoon visit on their circuit). No nuthatches lately. The crow paused to look longingly at the feeder, but they have learned not to approach. Long ago, I taught my dog to chase off the crows, but not other birds. The crows have remembered, despite Strider being too blind and arthritic to care any longer.

Here I try not to feed the crows much, because they would eat me out of house and home and drive off the smaller birds if I didn't have feeders they can't cope with. No pecking at a suet ball. Until I got cages to hold them, they would pick the whole thing off the fence and fly off with it.

But when we lived in a more urban part of the city I would put bread out on the balcony, and enjoyed watching them. Now and again, if there was no bread out there, I would feel something, and sure enough, one of the crows would be standing in front of the door staring, giving me the eye until I cut up a few pieces and took them out.

What a fun idea for a thread. :)

>1 qebo: What a charming view you have from your new deck. Congratulations!

>7 2wonderY: A slightly different angle in either direction would hit neighboring structures... house, shed, fence.

>1 qebo: nice deck! Looks like a great viewing location.

This is my second year in Project Feederwatch. This weekend I saw black-capped chickadees, pine grosbeaks, blue jays, redpolls, ruffed grouse, and bohemian waxwings. I also often get downy and hairy woodpeckers, grey jays, and evening grosbeaks.

RE: turkey vultures - I saw one at my parents' house, which is _weird_ - they're right on San Francisco Bay, literally across the street from the beach. I was driving down that street and saw this huge brown bird gliding very low over their condo and the one next door - it dipped down over the face of the other one and came low enough I saw the bright red head. It has to be a turkey vulture, but I never thought of them as being beach birds. I think it was sitting on top of the other building later, too - not leaving immediately.

The reason it was so low was that it was being harassed by a gull - they've learned bad manners from the corbies (I can't tell whether what we have here are large crows or small ravens), who have been harassing a raptor that's been hanging around the beach too. Also weird (since it isn't an osprey) but less weird than the turkey vulture. I also haven't been able to determine what the raptor is - bigger than the gulls (Californian and American), bigger than the corbies, much smaller than the pelicans; white breast, brown back, mottled brown belly and I think legs. Nothing quite seems to match.

I like watching birds, but I'm not very good at identifying them, despite an Audubon app on my phone and half a dozen bird books. Some I can tell, but unless there's some really obvious identification point (like a bright red head), I usually can't get more specific than genus, and some not even that - raptor, corbie, some kind of finch probably, hummingbird...that one's probably an Anna's but those might be female Anna's or something else entirely...

>10 jjmcgaffey:

I have a really good app on my phone for bird identification from Cornell. It's great because it localizes the birds to the ones that you are most likely to see in the area at which you are currently located. You should allow this app to geolocate you, though. The app is called Merlin. Try it and see if it works better for you.

I've tried it and it's worse than Audubon for me - I've never come up with even a close identification with Merlin (and the website is the same). I don't know how to browse on it, only search, and searching comes up with garbage every time (little brown bird with yellow head. Or maybe orange head and gray body...hard to tell, they're middling colors. I try to search...can't say head, can just say two colors - so I get Baltimore orioles, which aren't anything like (about twice the size, for one thing!)). Is there a way to browse, or look more generally? I believe it knows my location, but I'll check that too.

>12 jjmcgaffey:

My Merlin app allows me to enter the following information:
current location
date
size of bird
up to three main colors
location of the bird
Then you get a list of several birds on which you can scroll down.

I don't always get the bird, but I get it most of the time.

Keep a field guide at hand for those times it's hard to tell some birds apart.

Yeah. It's the size and color bits that don't work for me...every time I've tried it, I've gotten a list of birds none of which bear any resemblance to the bird I'm trying to identify. It's probably my failing, not Merlin's - I'm getting something basic wrong. But I don't know what, I'm putting my best info/guess in...

:(

All this activity on the thread, and all I've seen is a squirrel. :-)

I can't identify much of anything out in nature. I take photos and check later.

And I tried Merlin again, and this time it worked better for me - not that it changed, but I think I was looking for different things. Got enough info that now I think we have a mix of crows and ravens, and I think I'll be able to tell the next time I see a corbie. And that raptor is possibly a peregrine falcon! I didn't know they hunted on mudflats, but we've got lots of those... The other possibility is a red-tail hawk - what I saw doesn't match any of the pictures, but Merlin specifically says they have a lot of plumage variability.

>17 jjmcgaffey: - I've used Merlin, and find it really depends a lot on what has been reported to ebird in your area. You can also search the database, which was much more useful for me. When I installed Merlin, its database was downloaded to my phone, so I didn't even need data access. I was trying to identify a duck, and it kept coming up with non-duck or very different duck choices, although the duck I wanted was in the database. I guess it hadn't been reported on ebird in my area (which is pretty remote, and hasn't a lot of ebird reports) so the blue-winged teal (which is what it was) wasn't coming up as a choice.

jjmcgaffey - it sounds like red-tailed hawk is likely if it's found in your area. At least around here (NE US), if you see a hawk being harrassed by other birds it's almost always a red-tailed. They do have a heavily speckled (or mottled) and ill-defined (not with clear borders) band across their belly. The red in their tail is most visible if seen from the top side when they're in flight (with the tail feathers spread out) and with the sun shining - not always (or even usually) the way one sees them.

Sorry for hijacking the thread, Katherine - just reading through old posts to catch up with the group. Any more success with the feeders now that they've been filled for a while?

>19 muddy21: Go ahead and hijack... nothing much for me to report. I've been inconsistent about filling the feeders because I wasn't living in the new house until just before Christmas, and since then I've often been back at the old house during the day to get things organized. When I do fill the feeders, the squirrels take over immediately. I haven't had time to reconsider feeder locations.

I had left my feeders empty through the summer this year for the first time in a long time. I only just started filling them again about a week before Christmas since we still hadn't had snow. It's been taking a while for the birds to start coming around again, though it's picking up a bit now.

Love scrolling through this thread. I plan to check out the FeederWatch site. I also like the idea of putting a bird app on my phone. Honestly, such things never occur to me. How fun.

>22 labwriter: I have been a FeederWatch failure this year so far. I can't do the count on weekdays unless I set up feeders outside my office window, which is possible but not simple. I've been mostly at the old house on weekends. FeederWatch continues into early April though, and they say even a single count helps.

Today I got visitors.

White-throated sparrow?

Love the snow. We got sleet, freezing rain, heavy rain, and now snow flurries. I don't miss shoveling the stuff, but it sure is pretty.

>25 fuzzi: White-throated sparrow?
Yes, according to a visiting friend who knows more about birds than I do. Today also were juncos and cardinals and a downy woodpecker. Not easy to get photos with snow on the screens and doors.

>26 qebo: I sacrificed one window for bird feeder-watch: I removed the screen, and put it in the shed.

Got birds!

The blizzard in the DC area drove these birds into my back yard looking for food today:
House sparrows (tons of them)
White-throated sparrow
Song sparrow
Red-bellied woodpecker
Downy woodpecker
Slate-colored junco
Mourning dove
Carolina wren
Blue jay
Cardinals (a pair of them)
European starling
Northern mockingbird
American goldfinch

This was a pretty good variety of species (13). Usually I only have house sparrows (tons of them) at my feeders!

>28 SqueakyChu: nice variety!

>30 SqueakyChu: Once the snow is gone, they're going to leave. :(

I've been getting these birds throughout the winter, but only one or two different species each day no matter what kind of food I put out. It gets boring not having different birds!! :)

>28 SqueakyChu: Wow!

Tomorrow should also be a high bird species number day, especially since the snow will have stopped, and most food sources for the birds will be completely covered with snow. I don't bother using trays. I just keep sprinkling all kinds of nuts, seeds, dried fruits and grain on the top of the snow. Our heated birdbath now looks like a deep well. We'll have to dig it out tomorrow. I have no idea when we'll see our two feral cats again. :(