I had another nice day in the yard yesterday (8/12/2013) with sightings of a female Wilson’s warbler and a female Western tanager… and a possible sighting of a Golden-crowned kinglet.  I believe there were a couple of other interesting birds but I can’t recall what they were at this point.  Unfortunately I didn’t get any usable photos of the more interesting birds.

However, for any of you who are beginning birders or live in other areas outside of these birds’ ranges, here are a few photos of three birds that can be confused.

The largest of the birds is a male House sparrow with a seemingly inexhaustible population and range.  Although it is a substantially larger size, it can be confused with the Chestnut-backed chickadee pictured below it.

Male House Sparrow

Chestnut-backed Chickadee

And another of our three species of chickadees here is the Black-capped chickadee…

Black-capped Chickadee

Finally, a sad story.  My wife told me several days ago that she saw a Dark-eyed junco (Oregon race) feeding a juvenile Brown-headed cowbird.  Yesterday I managed to photograph the interaction.  This means that a female Brown-headed cowbird was able to lay an egg in the junco’s nest and the junco is raising the cowbird as its own… despite the cowbird being almost half again larger than the surrogate parent.  And it’s possible that the breeding season was lost for the pair of juncos.  Plus they’re raising yet another cowbird that could do the same thing to them, and will do the same thing to other birds, next season.

Dark-eyed Junco in the process of feeding a juvenile Brown-headed Cowbird.