We’ll start with a photo of a relatively rare bird that was in the yard on Sunday, 8/2.  We have seen only one other all season and I was very lucky to have been able to separate this bird from all the other traffic in the yard.  Do you know the species and sex of this bird?

After several weeks of unexceptional sightings (with the exception of the Western Scrub jay and a very few Cedar waxwing visits), things have begun to pick up.  I’m once again seeing warblers in the yard… in fact, last week I tallied three different species.  Here are photos of a male Wilson’s warbler and an Orange-crowned warbler…

The hummingbirds are mostly gone and are only rarely using the single feeder that I still have up, but here is one of the few remaining Rufous hummingbirds.  This appears to be a juvenile male.

As I believe I might have mentioned in a prior post, Downy woodpeckers in the area apparently had a successful breeding season since for a long time we were being visited by a couple of juveniles.

Here’s a photo of a male House finch feeding on some ‘habitat enhancer’ on the ground…

And finally, a photo of an American robin which just finished a bath!

And the photo of the mystery bird at the top of this column?  It’s a female Western tanager.  We only had one other this year and it was a male which made a single appearance a couple of months ago.