I was at the Post Office yesterday and noticed that they have a ‘forever’ stamp series based on songbirds. So those of you who consider yourself birders and enjoy advocating for them can now use forever stamps with pictures of songbirds. And since the stamps are good for first-class postage forever, you should avail yourself of several sheets (20/sheet).
About 3pm on September 26, 2014 I had an amazing experience… maybe my best of what has been a very nice, extended summer of birding in the yard. Since my morning walk in Washington Park had been rained out, I was considering taking a makeup walk in the middle of the afternoon. As I was tidying up the kitchen in preparation for leaving, I glanced out the window towards the watercourse and was surprised to see American robins all over the yard and the water features. I estimate that there were at least a dozen in the yard, but the actual number could easily have been twice that. I realized that there might be a Varied thrush among them and so started watching a little more intently. It was difficult observation… the robins and many other species of birds were moving all around the yard, trees and water features. There was no Varied thrush among them but I saw something even better… a Swainson’s thrush. How can it be ‘better’? If the past is any indication, the Varied thrushes will eventually be coming down from the mountains and will visit our yard daily for several months this winter. The Swainson’s thrush is a much rarer visitor to our yard and will migrate south for the winter so we won’t have even a possibility of another sighting until spring.
The activity in the yard was like a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s, The Birds. In the space of about 15 minutes I saw:
• 2 Brown creepers
• 2 Yellow-rumped warblers (Make that three Yellow-rumped warblers. In addition to the two pale (probably first-year females I observed in the yard, while I was writing this I just spotted a male Audubon’s Yellow-rumped warbler still in breeding plumage!)
• A pale female Western tanager (which I thought was long-gone!)
• At least one Spotted towhee
• Our first Golden-crowned sparrow returning for the winter season
• A Song sparrow, an as of late very rare visitor since our previous winter resident(s) left in the spring
• And the usual cast of Chestnut-backed and Black-capped chickadees, House sparrows, and House finches.
After about fifteen minutes there was some abatement of the activity, but unfortunately one of the Yellow-rumped warblers flew into the window right in front of me and spiraled to the ground below. I knew my presence in the yard would result in the birds leaving, but I wanted to do what I could for the warbler. It was conscious and I reached down and lifted it off the ground, at which time it made a rapid recovery and flew 30-40’ across the yard. It wasn’t a great flight but at that point I felt that it would survive.
So for the past couple of weeks I had thought that my photographic activities in the yard were winding down, but if it doesn’t rain tomorrow I think I’m going to have to be back out in the yard for a while!
Sorry… no photos. And this is my first posting in a couple of weeks. I’ve apparently successfully copied my photos from the 1T internal hard drive on my laptop to a new external 2T drive. I have a few photos from the yard, from an excursion out into the county and I also took a four-day trip to Winthrop which generated a considerable number of photos. Due to the overhead associated with the image transfer I didn’t process images for a few days, and by the time I got up the courage to download to the external hard drive I had accumulated over 470 images that I’m still trying to process! So I do have some new photos and I’ll try to post some photos before too long.
DON’T FORGET THE SONGBIRD STAMPS available at the US Postal Service!