BIRDS

I took the day off from work so my wife and I could go look for a Sora that had been spotted this morning at a wetland preserve in the north suburbs. We saw two (!) and they totally made my week.

Oh awesome, congrats! We saw a sora unexpectedly while failing to see the cinnamon teal we were looking for and it was super exciting.

Birds outside my window had a 10-second conversation that I wish I could have recorded for you. It wasn't the usual call and response. What were they talking about?

Bought my wife a brilliant little transparent house-shaped feeder that suckers onto the kitchen window for our smaller birds to have a go on, instant joy.

Then a blackbird tried to land on it and couldn't settle so instead shat all over it in spite, BIRDS

bumper day for magpies down the park today. 18 in total, including one bopping around that was obviously new - slightly ill-defined feathers, making feed-me motions to the parents, but already like 80% the size of the parents

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/16/science/pandemic-nature-anthropause.html

there is a bird that appears to have a nest somewhere in the top of my overgrown hedge. I'm so crap at bird identification but it might be a starling. It keeps getting closer and closer to me and doesn't take flight if I move. Even my dog who chases pigeons is chill with it and just sits and curiously observes it hopping around the garden.

what are those birds outside every morning at about 5:30 (West London) making the comedy laser beam noises? whoop whoop. piaooooo.

I don't know but the Birdnet app should tell you.

it is none of these: https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/bird-songs/what-bird-is-that/

Well, starlings are mimics, so their range of sounds is much wider than what is represented there. Plus they commonly congregate in urban areas. So my money is on our dear old friend Sturnus vulgaris.

Maybe someone's been playing the Go-Kart Mozart version of Roger Whittaker's New World in the Morning within their earshot, who knows?

Could well be ring-necked parakeets? Noisy bastards.

whoop whoop piaaaaooooo definitely sounds like a starling

i love how starlings talk! i once heard two of them quietly making car alarm sounds to each other and it was mighty cute i tell ya

i think it'll be too quiet to get a recording (and f downloading an app just for this tbh). will try and spot the culprit(s) tomorrow.

there was a 4am blackbird but I've not heard him for a while. every morning, just before it started getting light. and then he'd stop.

Someone on the street whistles after a woman. It is the characteristic two-note whistle. It may or may not be the same subject and object each time.

In some highly evolved species, there might be a separate whistle to denote the various types of attraction by the gender of the subject and the object and the nature of the attraction. This would be better than pronouns if outside of this it did not matter.

A pigeon made a nest in the tree in my garden and has been a constant presence for the last month. It would never leave the nest or at least I'd never seen it leave so I presume it was protecting a bairn. I noticed two days ago it had gone + hasn't been sighted since. Then today I noticed a dead squab in the garden directly below the nest. It has definitely been killed by another bird because there is a big grotesque hole in it that looks consistent with having its flesh eaten by a beak or beaks. I was wondering if a bird of prey did this or maybe there could be other squabs up there that decided to eat their sibling when ma didn't return.

could have been a magpie. They will dine on pigeon given the opportunity

I get annoyed with pigeons when they shit on me or on my bins or all over the path to my front door, but feel genuinely sad about this.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fc4GMyqWIAI9cdM?format=jpg&name=small

happier days for my pigeon friend.

a zillion redwings on the tree just outside my window, right on Snow Day cue. it does have berries after all

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-gloucestershire-64458219

could see a section of this out of our back window whilst home at Christmas but the main event seems to have been above the local park about 500 yds away

(starling murmuration)

I do the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch every year on the last w/e of January. One spends an hour counting them. In our garden this year we had:

blue tit 7, great tit 4, blackbird 2, long-tailed tit 2, coal tit 1, dunnock 2, blackcap 2, nuthatch 2, great spotted woodpecker 1, robin 2, starling 2, goldcrest 1.

This is the biggest species diversity we've had by far in the decade or so we've been living in our house. And there are species that visit occasionally that didn't deign to appear during that hour, including wood pigeon, pied wagtail, magpie, chaffinch and goldfinch.

It helps that we feed them a lot! Fat balls, suet pellets, peanuts, seed mix, mealworms and Flutter Butter (peanut butter for birds).

On one occasion we had a parakeet. There are probably 6 or so breeding pairs within Oxford...they hang out in the University Parks apparently. They've been going further up the Thames year by year. I saw some in Old Windsor in 2018 and that was the first I'd seen them outside SW London.

neat eagle

https://maineaudubon.org/news/rba-stse-2023/

fuck the post but respect to the headline writer
https://nypost.com/2023/02/03/hoo-dini-owl-on-the-loose-after-vandalism-at-central-park-zoo-enclosure-cops/

this morning i finally saw the woodpecker i've been hearing for the last month

on my 36th birthday the other week, while moping about not being allowed on a cable car, i finally saw a Dipper for the first time, was one of the greatest birthday presents ever ngl

sick. i saw one of those in downtown denver

Dippers rule. Only one I've seen 'live' is on the river in Betws-y-Coed. Amazing wee thing.

I was totally gobsmacked I was like there is no way I'm finding this animal in a 2 mile stretch of creek and YET

mine was in Matlock Bath, was lucky enough to get a good photo and video too, in breeding song too

a lifetime of gazing at creeks and streams thinking 'just maybe' and it's when my gf has said no we're not spending 30 quid each on the cable car and i'm moping behind her back into town, look down and pow

Never seen a dipper, but always feel a kinship with them as someone who likes to sing AND swim,

Apparently this is another case where the UK version looks a lot cooler than the US one. Still hope to see an American Dipper one day.

uk one looks like the us one but with a cool paint job

A couple of weeks ago I saw a bearded vulture with my own eyes, it was absolutely majestic. Today I went to Wikipedia to learn more about it and.... jeez

It usually disdains the actual meat and lives on a diet that is typically 85–90% bones. While the bone marrow contains fat and energy, they consume all of it.[26]This is the only living bird species that specializes in feeding on bones.

The bearded vulture can swallow whole or bite through brittle bones up to the size of a lamb's femur[28] and its powerful digestive system quickly dissolves even large pieces. The bearded vulture has learned to crack bones too large to be swallowed by carrying them in flight to a height of 50–150 m (160–490 ft) above the ground and then dropping them onto rocks below, which smashes them into smaller pieces and exposes the nutritious marrow.[9] They can fly with bones up to 10 cm (3.9 in) in diameter and weighing over 4 kg (8.8 lb), or nearly equal to their own weight.[9]

After dropping the large bones, the bearded vulture spirals or glides down to inspect them and may repeat the act if the bone is not sufficiently cracked.[9] This learned skill requires extensive practice by immature birds and takes up to seven years to master.[29] Its old name of ossifrage ("bone breaker") relates to this habit. Less frequently, these birds have been observed trying to break bones (usually of a medium size) by hammering them with their bill directly into rocks while perched.

Spot dippers fairly regularly here in Dublin. Although this is on the Dodder, which can get fairly bucolic in certain stretches even though it's essentially in the middle of the city

I've seen kingfishers there once or twice too. Near impossible to photograph with my crappy phone camera though

I've just remembered: when I was searching how to spell Betws-y-Coed earlier, Google asked me if I was looking for 'busty co-ed' so that's nice.

Been quite a bird-shy winter on the whole? Last thing I can remember of note was a tree full of redwings, I assume beginning the long-haul home.

Here's a first: i just saw a hawk resting on the pavement on W110th St. It flew away before i could snap a pic but WOW

GREAT HORNED OWL IS BACK W00T W00T

still just an audio sighting tho

one of these moonful nights i oughtta go on an owl prowl

first time hearing a hummingbird this season, zwooping past the window at dawn, sounding like a little jetsons car

& yesterday saw this dear pair of chickadees excavating themselves a hole in a dead tree where a branch had broken off. dipping their heads in, tippytippytap, flitting to the next branch over to wipe the woodfuzz from their beaks and going back for more. they got it deep enough to fit about halfway in before taking a break, and once the coast was clear a pair of nuthatches swooped in to see if it was worth stealing.

or perhaps i've got it all wrong, maybe the nuthatches contracted the chickadees to chip out a cozy tree hollow and were merely checking on its progress? i do not know enough about the avian economy, or the relations between these two pairs of birds, to definitively say. if i'm in the neighborhood again later & can deduce more i will keep this thread updated (unless i forget).

Today in the park in Brooklyn I saw an American Treecreeper. Not mega rare but I’ve certainly never seen one before - I though it was some kind of extra small extra cute variety of nuthatch but no it’s the only North American member of its family! Stickin it’s head in the bark gaps and blendin in.

I am a huge fan of the general scuttling about on the sides of trees bird group so this was very exciting.

ambushed by unexpected betws-y-coed!

(one of the field centres that made up the network of my late dad's work -- FSC rhyd-y-creuau -- is based very close by)

This hummingbird stops by for baths every morning. pic.twitter.com/oaWm354Cy3

— Fascinating (@fasc1nate) May 3, 2023

(all the more odd because of the way modern cameras work)

saw small, white, heron-shaped thing in the thames this morning by hammersmith bridge. book tells me it could be a small egret. egrets, i have a few...

the usual grey wagtail was hopping about too.

The sun rises at 5:30 and sets at 9:30 where I live now, and around 9 PM every night for the last week or so, a very large, extremely horny robin has landed on the fence post directly outside my office window to sing his fuck-me song for a half hour. It's cool, and kind of entertaining, but also sort of annoying. Also, around 4 PM most days, a pair of very large hawks (or possibly eagles) come out and circle slowly over the trees and field behind my building for an hour or so. And there's a gang of crows that live near the Mexican place where I get lunch once a week, and I see them flying from tree to tree. They're gigantic. Montana: these goddamn birds act like they own the place!

i have a 4am bird, a blackbird i think, that seems to think the dawn chorus starts an hour before it starts to get light