It’s a tough, unpleasant job having to take up blogging again after having published photographs of a Western Scrub jay in your yard a couple of weeks ago! What can you possibly do for an encore?

The warblers have finally started finding their way back to the yard after a lull of a couple of months. In the last week we’ve had visits from a couple of Yellow-rumped warblers (including a beautiful male Audubon’s, an Orange-crowned warbler that took an extended bath and visits by both male and female Wilson’s warblers, which were conspicuously absent during the spring migration.  I managed to get NO photographs of the birds, although I have many from earlier in the spring and prior years.

And though we had at least one family of Red crossbills with at least three young, they abandoned us two to three weeks ago.

A surprise visitor was this difficult to identify young bird, which is rather nondescript and somewhat resembles several other juvenile species.

Fortunately I was provided a rather obvious clue shortly after its arrival…

In past years adult Red-winged blackbirds have made rather frequent trips to the feeders during the breeding season, my theory being to keep from spending too much time away from the nest. This is the first year when an adult has shown up so late and with one of the juveniles in tow.

We have successfully fledged at least a couple of White-crowned sparrows, another species that visits every spring but until last year (when they raised a Brown-headed cowbird) never spent the breeding season in the area.  (I’m hoping that this is a photo of one of the juvenile White-crowned sparrows!)

Most of the male Rufous hummingbirds have already left on their fall migration, leaving only a few females and juveniles behind.  (This may not look much like a Rufous hummingbird but I can defend my identification with other photos I took of the bird.)

Downy woodpeckers apparently successfully raised at least one, and possibly two (based on yard exit direction) families this breeding season. For weeks the young woodpeckers spent considerable time at the suet feeder before I took it down due to predation by European starlings. I had a neighbor that complained about the starlings and asked me what to do about them. I told him to leave his feeders up… it would mean fewer trips to my feeders!

But here is an interesting photo I took in early July. This female Downy woodpecker was on one of the staging sticks by a bird bath, and the bird spied a tiny insect hole in the stick. Here you can see her inserting her tongue into the hole to explore for food! This can’t be a good way to make a living!

A curiosity about birding identification.  I code my photographs with the sex of the birds when I can make that determination.  If the bird is a juvenile I also apply a code for that.  But at this time of year the sexual identification gets somewhat problematic for some species, such as some warblers, hummingbirds, grosbeaks, goldfinches, House finches, crossbills, etc.  The sexes of birds of these species, and others, can’t be safely established by someone with my lowly birding skills.  So in many cases I’m left knowing only that the birds are either juveniles or females.

And finally, presumably during the night of July 19/20, a large dead pine tree in the yard, which was a lot more rotten than I realized, fell over and landed immediately adjacent to the place from which I photograph birds in the watercourse! Had I been sitting in my usual place when it happened it wouldn’t have mattered that it physically missed me… I would have been so frightened that I would have had a heart attack! This dead tree held a suet feeder and was the primary staging tree for the yard, often giving me advance notice of special arrivals. I’m still trying to figure what to do about it, but my current thought is to try to find a smaller dead tree and bury the butt end in the ground. If you have any candidates I would like to hear from you!

On the afternoon of 7/12/2015 my wife called to me from the kitchen and told me that there was a Western Scrub jay in the yard!  I thought it doubtful since I have never seen one in Western Washington but I rushed to the ;window, thinking that we might have a Stellar’s jay in the yard, itself a very rare visitor.  However my wife was right… it was a Scrub jay!

I raced for my camera and sneaked out the door, trying to surreptitiously set up my camera before the bird left.  Unfortunately I was in its full view.  I managed one lousy photo before it briefly jumped to a staging stick in my inventory and then disappeared into a group of young madrone and fir trees.  The photo was good enough for identification but not much else.

Thus began a wait to see if the bird would reappear.  Fifty minutes later there was a combination among some chickadees and nuthatches at the edge of one of the madrones, and a minute or so later the Scrub jay flew out of the trees and onto one of our static bird baths in the yard.  I began taking photos and continued as it flew to a staging stick for our platform feeder and then back into the madrones.  Fortunately when it entered the madrones it landed on a perch that gave me a good visual corridor so I was able to obtain even more photos!

We’ve lived in the Cap Sante neighborhood for over 14 years and this is the first Scrub jay we’ve had in the neighborhood, to my knowledge.  Indeed, it’s the first I’ve seen in Western Washington… and it chose to show itself in our yard while I had my camera ready!

In almost all the years we’ve lived in the Cap Sante neighborhood (three locations for 14 years) we’ve had a nice population of California quail.  In the spring/summer of 2013 we seemed to have only one male, and in all of 2014 I saw, and perhaps more importantly heard, no quail.  Sadly, I assumed that they had been extirpated from the neighborhood.  I was therefore elated this spring when we had two different pairs in the yard at the same time!  While they haven’t spent all that much time in the yard, in the past few days we  had a pair bring in three chicks.  Since the broods in the past often numbered about a dozen, the three chicks indicate that the family has already experienced hardships.  But as small as these chicks are, and they are small, the little ones are already capable of at least 4-5 feet of vertical flight.

A couple of days ago I encountered a male a few blocks from our house that was tending seven even smaller chicks than the ones seen in our yard.  I can only hope that all the remaining chicks from both broods survive.

On July 4th the three-chick family visited the yard and gave me the opportunity for photographs.  So here are photos of the parents and one of the chicks…

The male, who serves as an able lookout…

The female…

The female and one of the flight-capable chicks…