DISMANTLE WHARF

Our house wren Sharif is back! He travels so far every year to use a niche in our water heater closet for his nesting site. It's a great location; too small for larger birds to investigate, with a lobby opening up to the middle of our mini-meadow, overlooking all the surrounding trees. Today he's building his nest, singing his claim, and soon he will be calling for a woman full-time.

I'm so genuinely joyful Hopefully he will be here for months. He is so small, so loud, and so brave.

Hooray Sharif!

I saw a male Western Tanager in breeding plumage last week and it took me so long to figure out what it was!

(not my photo:)

He fancy

Mourning Doves & Pigeons (standard, municipal)
Gambel's Quail (fam with scrambling chicks!)
Roadrunners (clicking like dinos, fat lizards dangling from jaws)
Curved-bill Thrashers (sort of a dowdy little bird, with unnerving, sentient yellow eyes)
Ruby-Throated Hummers (one mistook my flower printed deck chair for the real McCoy, and got very close to my butt)
An Anna's Hummer or two (that FUSCHIA neckbeard tho)
Harris Hawks (leggy)
Cooper's Hawks (stripey)
Night Hawks (such an elegant shape, and they make the gentlest whiffling noises as they fly)
Goldfinches (Lesser, I believe)
Northern Cardinals (electric red against cactus green! *swoon*)
Gila Woodpecker (this bitch)

FOMO

Lucky Luc wrote: ↑Wed Apr 29, 2020 10:38 am Mourning Doves & Pigeons (standard, municipal)
Gambel's Quail (fam with scrambling chicks!)
Roadrunners (clicking like dinos, fat lizards dangling from jaws)
Curved-bill Thrashers (sort of a dowdy little bird, with unnerving, sentient yellow eyes)
Ruby-Throated Hummers (one mistook my flower printed deck chair for the real McCoy, and got very close to my butt)
An Anna's Hummer or two (that FUSCHIA neckbeard tho)
Harris Hawks (leggy)
Cooper's Hawks (stripey)
Night Hawks (such an elegant shape, and they make the gentlest whiffling noises as they fly)
Goldfinches (Lesser, I believe)
Northern Cardinals (electric red against cactus green! *swoon*)
Gila Woodpecker (this bitch)

Some real good pulls here, thanks for sharing!

G

Spotted this menace loitering outside while I was getting my tires changed

Anyone have any ideas on what this bird is? There were two in my front yard (is there a separate thread for front yard birding?) yesterday eating dandelion fluff. They are tiny, like maybe 1.5 hummingbirds in height, and slim, not puffballs. I used the Merlin Bird app but couldn't find any results that seemed quite right.

We have these guys too!

I think it’s a goldfinch, no?

I’ll leave the ID to the authorities ([mention]DUCKULA[/mention] ?!)

I’m always shocked at how light birds are. These guys will land on the slimmest bendiest flower stem in our yard and it’ll barely dip.

It does seem like it could be a goldfinch. The image results for "goldfinch" are so much yellower than my visitors were, but I guess I am seeing one or two that are more muted..maybe it is a gender/age thing.

Looks like a goldfinch to me! Tiny little guys

Looks like you've got some Lesser Goldfinches there, @alex! Perhaps not yet into their full breeding plumage, but cut 'em some slack.

I learned recently that the pigments in their feathers come from the good they eat! So they need to eat a lot of seeds to get that richer yellow tint.

I saw them again yesterday morning, I think they are locals. I will see if they brighten up over time, since they essentially have a free 24 hour all you can eat buffet.

I love laying in bed in the morning and listening to all of them. I can hear someone's chicks screeching their simple whines. There are at least a dozen species talking at once, with different subsets of calls. I love hearing one bird call out and hearing its friend call back from a distance, and how they keep flying to different trees and call each other again. And then the mix of stationary birds and solo flyers and traveling mobs, it's so complex and spatially exciting.

And the squirrels, who sound just like birds!!

I love when a bird is just hopping around on the ground and doing its urgent peeps

I loved learning recently that a juvenile bird spends kind of a crazily long phase of its maturation period ON THE GROUND, unable to fly. It hops out of the nest, falls to the ground, and then it's just like....good luck, kid. It walks around until it figures out how to fly. This can take weeks??? Somehow they don't all get eaten by cats during this period. Sometimes the parents watch over it and try to chase cats away but also the kid is on their own. It is so funny and bizarre to me to think of an ungainly teenaged bluejay walking around on the ground, huddling under a bush at night, being like, what is this life

Fledglings! Our cats just murdered one last week </3

And doesn't the human experience snap into focus when held up to the funhouse mirror

I bet cats kill a shocking amount of them. Don't cats murder like 1 in every 3 of the world's birds? I remember being pretty shocked, whatever the actual statistic is.

alex wrote: ↑Thu May 07, 2020 9:37 am And doesn't the human experience snap into focus when held up to the funhouse mirror

Heavy

The swallows are back!!

[mention]yourfriendclaire[/mention] also to be clear I don't actually talk like that

I thought it was cool!

SPOTTED: a spiffy red-whiskered Bulbul alit on our Palo Verde

Gary, I loved your graceful information campaign! Outdoor cats really destroy the shit out of wildlife. They are great at protecting your ancient Egyptian grain silo, but they are a domesticated species that does not fit into any ecosystem. I used to let mine go outside but she's perfectly content to live like a Fauntleroy.

Kitty dûdù filtered down into the ocean and seals have toxoplasmosis now!

God bless us all, with peace and love—

Benny is allowed supervised trips outside but he's not that interested in it. He only wants to eat spider webs, and if there's none of those, he just wants to go back inside. Indoor boy!

I didn't mind being cat-shamed, Gary! I know it's bad. Our beloved cat Pete was hit by a car right outside our house a few years back, which led to several years of indoor-only feline activity. We started letting our cats outside again recently, supervised, because we're home all day now and we can keep an eye on them but it's true that they killed one bird (and scared a lizard half to death) while we weren't looking, which is indeed unforgivable.

Watching a bird who is so tiny, they hopped into a gap between grasses and disappeared. The grass was just mowed and can only be about 2 inches high.

The other morning I noticed a robin is building a nest in our front porch eave! You can't see the nest but I saw the zub fly up there with grass in their mouth and then I saw long pieces of grass sort of twitching and getting pulled up into the roof. STOKED. I really hope it happens!

My friend Owen had a robin build a nest in his front porch eave and it caused a huge situation where the post office wouldn't deliver their mail anymore because the bird parents would dive-bomb the mailman. The post office said they had to move the nest and Owen refused so they compromised I think by making a temporary mailbox out on the sidewalk?? It was some epic adventure but it turned out okay and the babies got hatched and everyone flew away. I hope this will happen in my house as well.

We also have BALTIMORE ORIOLES in our apple tree, a very fancy bird! Three males and a middle-aged female; would love to know more about that group dynamic. They are such an orange bird!

We also have yellow-rumped warblers in the apple tree, who are very funny birds, fat little chubs eating bugs on the wing.

Gary is concerned that perhaps the reason our massive ancient apple tree has not produced a crop in 6 years is because wagtails eat all the buds off it. Could this be true???? I thought it was just a finicky tree very sensitive to weather patterns but if it's zubs that's a whole other problem. But it seems weird that Mother Earth would create a dynamic where birds could prevent a tree from fruiting? Why would they??

This dang apple tree was a big reason why we bought this house--the day we looked at the house it was full apple season and there were probably 10,000 apples rotting in a massive layer covering the whole yard. We were like THIS IS THE PLACE FOR US but then it hasn't made apples since. As far as life problems go this is a small one but still

Bird Fancy!

A wild thicket of dandelions was whipping about—no, it was a golden yellow bird!

A new bird on the scene looked and moved like a robin, but smaller, all gray, with a black cap and eye rings.

Our yard is like critter TV. It is of short grass, surrounded by trees on all sides. It's like the public commons of the birdizens who keep their homes in the trees.

Sharif flies fast and low, going from his best to the burn pile a thousand times a day.

Mother Nature only designs for teams, so if the bud-eating bird was from a different team than Mr. Apple, the tree would not have planned for such an interaction. Maybe the tree is shy.

Might I recommend a birdbath to you all fine people? It is so funny to watch the birds take their spa day. What a mess they make! Then they fly into a tree and you can watch them shake off the water and preen and ruffle themselves up. RCH your yard sounds like it’s perfect for a b bath. Hours of enjoyment for ALL

- Two Cooper’s Hawks mad-dogging a bunch of crows in some eucalyptus trees at the park
- Two RED-TAILED hawks doing breeze donuts at the summit of a recent hike


[mention]ritchey[/mention], what kind of bird bath do you have? Getting a bird bath is on my list of quarantine stretch goals (up there with “finish book proposal”) but the ones available at our local nurseries/Home Depot locations are all either $400 or hideous or both. I want to maybe make my own with a bubbler and a big old pot or something but I think that might be beyond my handywoman capacities

I think any big shallow dish-like entity would work! Ours was like $30; I don’t know what the $400 could possibly be for, in terms of bells n whistles! It’s just a big ass bowl. We got ours at the farmers co-op but they also have them at the hardware store. You gotta do it!! You’ll love it I promise

We gotta circulate water out here for vector control, so everything has some kind of fountain component!

oh wow! Well then I have no idea. Ours is just a shallow dish on a stand.
What's "vector control"????

fwiw, I grew up in a hot dry place and my mom and grandma both always had bird baths that were just big old wide bowls. Nothing fancy. Nana's was on a cute stand. Mom's was on a buncha rocks on the ground. Doves and quails and babies and baths. HOT.

I just put a terra cotta pot upside down and balanced the saucer on top. I change the water every day, and clean it once every few weeks.

ritchey wrote: ↑Tue May 19, 2020 5:02 am oh wow! Well then I have no idea. Ours is just a shallow dish on a stand.
What's "vector control"????

No standing water because mosquitoes! Standing water is a vector for their breeding, hence controlling the vectors to limit their populations.

It’s a big thing in LA. Dengue Fever and Zika, I think? The city has a whole vector control squad! They’ve done a lot of outreach about it over the last few years so it’s really been instilled in my mind that standing water is a sin

oh dang.

Wow!!!!!

We have horrible mosquitoes here too but I’ve never heard of this. Gary cleans ours out basically every day and fills it w new water so maybe that’s enough vectoring?

I think you can make a fountain pretty easily- my mom did it once, (and no offense Mom) she has no handy person skills to speak of. I think she used a fish tank gurgler?

you can get one with a more kind/earthy vibe from a craftsperson?
https://www.etsy.com/search?q=bird%20ba ... bath%20fou

Very good bird report. I've felt similarly about Northern Flickers since one landed right next to me in a feeder a few years ago. Here are some paintings I have made of them:

THREE baby screech owls on our fence last night, chirping and checking us out and doing that thing with their heads that owls do! It was basically the cutest thing ever.

Their parents were around as well. We have a whole family back there!

MORE PHOTOS!

there's a video, and I think he needs to post it!
when I saw it, I dieed

Two bird-adjacent recommendations!

1. Wingspan (board game). We just got this and it's very complicated, so I can't really report on the gameplay itself, but it's aesthetically delightful - beautiful bird cards to collect, and tiny wooden eggs, and a little birdhouse you build for the dice.

2. The gorgeous new book What It's Like to Be a Bird. We have learned many interesting facts from it already! For example, that chickadees feed their babies a lot of spiders because spiders contain taurine, which is important for nervous system development. Or that some birds do something called "anting," where they either roll around in an anthill, or pick up ants with their beaks to rub them on their feathers, and we're not totally sure why they do it, but it might be because the formic acid produced by the ants helps keep their feathers healthy, and/or because it causes ants to discharge their toxic formic acid and then they are safe to eat.

HOW DO I POST A VIDEO?

Do I need to upload this thing to YouTube???