BIRDS

do you feed the hummingbirds wmc?

here's the thing, though - the bird I saw (and you can just about see it in the video) didn't seem to have any markings on its underside

next time I'll have my binoculars on me

Nick -- yes, we have feeders on the back deck and outside my office window.

must be amazing, would never get any work done if i were at your desk

lj - guess it'll be there again tomorrow, same time, same place. always think of nightingales as very secretive things, would be nice to get a good sight of one. on our dog walk today we had whitethroats dodging around in the gorse. swifts have come back too, best birds ever

this is better nightingale film btw, this one sounds really goddamn song thrushy too i'm getting more confused the more i listen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enOsGUdyjmc&NR

maybe you have to see them live or something but in a way they're a bit overrated imo, i reckon robins and dunnocks have far prettier songs. best one i hear regularly though is the wren. really long complex energetic lines, they're like the john coltranes of the bird world doing this sheets of sound thing. really blast it out for such diddy fuckers too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EAzaDSN70o

otm, wren song has been avant-garde for millennia

was definitely drawn out of my way to the nightingale/curiously unspotted songthrush tho. something about the song was arresting and alien - I was, as they say, compelled from my orbit, and the dog had to sit patiently while I drank it in, not at all feeling like I was riding the Romantics' steez

A gila woodpecker has made a nest at the top of a saguaro in my front yard. This is very exciting to me! This hole 16 feet up constantly emitting baby bird rasps with a mom periodically flying in and out.

A dove has taken up residence in our back yard. It doesn't seem injured, but it spends all its time on the ground, just hanging out, nestled down in the lawn except when our dog it out doing his business and barking at oxygen molecules. I wondered if it's a fledgling that doesn't quite know where to go next, but my daughter says she's seen its mate come around to it a few times a day.

our neighbours have installed a nest-box roughly 1 metre away from our bedroom window, currently occupied by a family of Great Tits. the parents approach the box cautiously, hopping all the way down the fence to a chorus of wheedling. needless to say, we're enthused

turkeys outside my window at 5:00 this morning. lobblelobblelobble. they've gone all huge, fat and wattley for summer. it's shooting season, so all the little country stores are selling "turkey supplies". by which they mean things with which to murder the beasts.

Went for a walk down the Thames foreshore at lunch and there were 2 Canadian geese with 3 goslings, so cute. Loads of geese around today, 3 different types. They're pretty tame, we were walking by really close and they just eyed us a bit and went back to napping.

there are swifts that fly around my neighbourhood, screaming, which is cool.

but today i was at hyde park's round pond and the swifts there, with all the extra space (and the high wind) were mental. 30 or so of them, down to about a foot off the water at times.

Feeding on midges I guess. Swifts are great, we always get a few pairs round here. A couple of years ago we found a baby one sitting on the pavement, didn't really know what to do with him/her, didn't really want them to be got by a cat so I picked them up and put them on a wall. So amazingly light! But he/she had these really horrible big lice things scuttling around on their plummage, tried to knock them off but they were really flat in profile and kept sliding in down under the feathers. Weird alien looking beasts. Anyhow, pretty sure the fledgling didn't survive cos I think I'm right in saying that swifts can't take off from the ground (wings too long, legs too short), so there's no way a parent could land to feed them.

Oh it was the swift lousefly, a parasite that is specific to swifts:

http://cdn1.arkive.org/media/15/15605FC2-2238-4770-9713-420ED99B6244/Presentation.Large/1-2-day-old-common-swift-chicks-in-nest-with-swift-lousefly-Crataerina-pallida.jpg

I love the swifts that come out at dusk around here, chattering their little hearts out while they fill up on bugs. I grew up hearing them called chimneysweeps instead of chimney swifts.

The ones we get here don't chatter, they scream instead, such a great sound.

They've been sounding incredible on my walk to work in a morning. That screeching! It does my head in a bit to think that they travel from Africa and end up on the side streets of Cowley Road, Oxford.

My starling is getting his white speckly beard and eyebrows in response to god knows what seasonal signal.

back in Italy for the month, god the birdlife here is fabulous. my latest avian crush would have to be the female & juvenile red-backed shrikes I espied perching not five metres from me at the tops of isolated stalks in a roadside field. what delightful little birds - unless you're an even littler bird

they don't even budge when you come close - amazing confidence. but then again they're quite closely related to crows, so their self-aggrandising bastardry is assured

never seen a shrike before. thought they'd be bigger. but I knew almost instantly what they were when I saw their regal, hawkish repose. imagine a warbler with *attitude*, like as gallus as all jeremy, and that's a shrike

I'd love to see a shrike!

Now you can. This landmark in wildlife photography was achieved earlier this afternoon with a cameraphone and a pair of binoculars:

http://i.imgur.com/bCPJFjC.jpg

The decline of kingfishers in the UK is shocking ...

That's v sad. One of my favorite birds in its North American iteration. Halcyon days no longer...

the rivers are fucked and the land is following them

HEY so I'm in Cyprus right now (posting to ILX, I know), and without having to move from my seat I just saw in plain view a jaunty flock of Sardinian Warblers. Neat little birds. Might have a wander outside with the binoculars, see what else there is

just saw a buzzard, couldn't tell if it was a Long-Legged Buzzard or a Steppe Buzzard (which is, boringly, a subspecies of the Common Buzzard). aaargh!

I guess that Cyprus must be a stopping-off point for lots of migrants moving from Europe to Africa, so it's probably a great time of year to see all sorts of species there.

ps bring me back a lammergeyer okay?

yeah i figured it'd be the perfect time to visit. if i see a lammergeier i will endeavour to photograph it

don't get fucking sardinian warblers in Minecraft

ok wow you guys, I saw a kingfisher today - get this - at sea

in fact on one of aphrodite's rocks, the halcyon love reborn

What is the North American bird that will make a nest of rocks on the ground, and then if you try to get near its nest, it will try to lure you away from the nest with aggressive yelling? I think one has made a nest under a shrub of mine. I don't want to kill its babies but I don't want to kill the shrub through not watering! I think knowing the species name would help.

Killdeer? Not sure about the yelling, but I know they'll pretend to be insured to lure you away

*injured

Yeah killdeer! Thanks^3
Almost as big a conflict as the time some robins built a nest in my dad's barbecue's chimney. Well, a conflict for everyone but my dad, who wanted to grill more than not kill some baby birds :(

I will have to watch more but I hope it's just some wacky springtime mating behavez on these birds' part

oh killdeerpaws. Dumbest nesting strategy.Also how the fuck did I miss this post:

ok wow you guys, I saw a kingfisher today - get this - at sea

in fact on one of aphrodite's rocks, the halcyon love reborn

― C/3 Jenks kakling Neu! military£ absinthe snkkt! pckls Özil JTCF njhtdgs (imago), Tuesday, September 24, 2013 3:44 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.somersetbirder.co.uk/black%20redstart%20brean%20small4.jpg

^ saw one of these sultry little things while i was out running along the clifftops on friday. slightly anonymous from some angles, like a really drab young euro robin, but as soon as they fly away there's that amazing rufous rump

Big beady eyes + tiny insectivore beak is the most adorable bird face morphism imo

i guess those eyes are totally evolved towards spotting small wriggly things in dim light conditions

There's a bird around here whose song is "chipper, chipper, chipper (in what would be a very whiny/wheedly tone if it came out of a person) -- wheet-wheet-wheet-wheet" and I can't for the life of me figure out what it is. I used to think it was a cardinal, but none of the recordings available online support that idea.

This is my yearly "the swifts are back in w12" post. Has been about a week.

Looking back at this thread their reappearance does seem to vary quite a bit, was April a few years ago, late may in other years.

And, unscientifically, I'd say there are more of them this year - I keep seeing 10 or so together rather than the 5s or 6s of last year

(I must go back to Hyde park and see if last year was a one-off or whether they congregate around the pond every year)

Parrots have names for themselves and each other! Plus baby parrots are ADORABLE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed9A4HPdXgQ

I don't know if it's the cool weather this week or what, but the hummingbirds in my yard are having a super freakout dance party.

Mine are too!

Anyway, today I've become smitten with little brown head parrots. Does anyone have a pet bird? Are they terrible to deal with? I'm not going to run out and buy one on a whim because they're about $600-700, but asking out of curiosity.

my sister in law had an eclectus parrot for about 10 years

I swear unless you talk directly to it for 8 hours a day, all it will do is scream that you're not paying attention to it. I wouldn't have lasted more than a week, I dunno how she managed 10 years. So much screaming. And she gave it a lot of attention!

Though she was GORGEOUS - beautiful deep crimson with bright blue swatches here and there, so amazing that those colors can exist on something in nature like that.