I was reading a book today and there was some innocuous line about waking up to "birds singing." I began thinking about what birds might be singing. My own wakeup is often to maybe a Steller's Jay, a Northern Flicker, or a Red-Breasted Nuthatch. Then the Golden-Crowned Kinglets come in, followed by the Chestnut-backed and Black-capped Chickadees. Maybe the Dark-Eyed Juncos making their little clicks that sound like a chirp played backwards.
These birds are my birds. It's like having a whole chorus of pets who come and go but are never far away. Like an outdoor cat who's a little shy, but you know he's around. They are definitely wild, but their presence feels comfortable, familiar. Depending on where you live, your home feeder birds will be different than mine. In other places it'll be House Sparrows or Cardinals or House Finches or Bridled Titmice.
It took my wife and I awhile to get a legit feeder station set up. We'd bought a pole that had spikes on the bottom, but one of them came off when I'd tried to push it into our extremely rocky soil. I ended up doing some research and managed to dig a hole with the flattened end of a tire iron. So, now that we have a squirrel-safe place to put a feeders, all of a sudden we're getting a closer look at some of the other visitors in our yard. We'd seen Spotted Towhees around, for example, but now we have them a lot more:
This Spotted Towhee likes to just sit in the feeder basket, not even eating. Just being ~surrounded by food~ I guess.
Yesterday I looked out the window and said to Prior, "What is going on on the feeder?"
Mentally I couldn't make sense of what I was seeing at first, so I got my binoculars and slowly realized what it was I was looking at. It was a Northern Flicker that had wrapped herself around the suet cage despite it being set up for smaller birds. I made a mental note to get one of those suet cages with the perches underneath for larger birds.
She came back later in the day and finished off last of the suet. Then she just stayed. She stayed and stayed, just looking around, like surely more suet would show up. This gal really likes suet I guess. I took this video:
She sat there doing this for what felt like forever
The other new visitor we've gotten is one that I'm pretty proud of, and I showed a bit of in my last post. We've got a mating pair of White-Throated Sparrows, a semi-rarity in our region. White-throated Sparrows always pair up as one with "tan-striped" plumage and one with "white-striped" plumage paired together, and that's the case here as well.
He's trying to hide, but the yellow dots give him away.
The white-striped one is in the top left, and the tan-striped one looks like a smudge in the grass in the bottom right. Don't they make a cute couple? I've always loved smudges.
You might think, if you've spent some time looking at ducks, for example, that the bold white-striped variety is the male and the subtle tan-striped is the female, but with White-Throated Sparrows you'd be wrong. Both varieties show up in both sexes, but they nearly always pair one white striped to one tan striped. I imagine a young gay white-throated sparrow bringing home a partner to dinner and his parents not being upset that it's a male, but that they're two tan-striped sparrows. "You'll never be accepted in polite society," one parent would say. Instead the two run off and join a flock of Song Sparrows, who all have tan stripes, and slowly they begin to learn to sing with them and to do musical theater and make those little chirps that Song Sparrows make that sound like the world's tiniest Chihuahua.
Check out the neck on this Spotted Towhee!
Kisses, Sara