Here's an email I wrote to my friend, the poet Kristin Lueke, about the birds in my backyard, in response to an email she wrote about the birds in her backyard:
Kristin,
I bought your poetry, I'm very excited.
Your email was beautiful.
I'm so envious of the birds you've attracted. I don't think I've seen any of those birds, aside from Robins and Northern Flickers, who are so so beautiful. Do you have the kind with red underneath their wings or the kind with yellow underneath their wings? Ours are red. Oh! and hummingbirds and sparrows. We get Anna's Hummingbirds exclusively, and our sparrows are mostly Song Sparrows, though I had a Significant Interaction with a Fox Sparrow the other day in our bushes.
the northern flicker and it's red and yellow variants
My feeders are primarily the domain of Red-Breasted Nuthatches, Chestnut-Backed Chickadees, Black-Capped Chickadees and the noble, goofy little Dark-Eyed Juncos, who my friend Irene calls "Zapatista birds" for the black balaclavas they wear on their heads. Occasionally I'll get a Steller's Jay or a Northern Flicker who try to sit on our little window feeders but they're too big, the feeder's too small. I need to set up a pole farther from the house with more feeders, but the ground is very rocky, it's going to take some digging. That's the plan for next month.
Dark-Eyed Junco aka Zapatista bird
Outside the feeders we're seeing Starlings and Bushtits and Crows and Ravens and every single day I hear Golden-Crowned Kinglets but I've never once seen one. Irene says they're easy to spot when it snows, because their gold heads contrast against the snow. We get Spotted Towhees rather than Canyon ones, and a Red-Breasted Sapsucker lives in our front yard. Brown Creepers love the trees nearby and Pacific Wrens love to chirp at me and dart around in the ferns.
The red-breasted sapsucker
We get bald eagles overhead! They're surprisingly common! Turns out they are real birds, but after seeing them on t-shirts and in ads, my brain feels like they should be something else. It's funny to think they're just animals and don't particularly care about being a symbol of anything at all.
Thanks for the email :)
Sara
ADDENDUM: I finally saw a fox sparrow. Didn't even have to hunt it down or play stuff from a phone or go into the woods and get blackberry thorns in my skirt. I saw it through binoculars while sitting at my desk procrastinating work, hopping its way into a huckleberry bush.
They look like sparrows. I don't know if its even worth posting a pic. Little brown speckledish bird. More exciting than a song sparrow, though, because they're a little bit ginger colored.