On Monday (9/7/2015) I was able to spend a little more time in the yard and scored on two other yard rarities… a Pacific Slope flycatcher and a Warbling vireo. (I needed help with the verification, but that’s the nice thing about photographs.)

The vireo accessed the watercourse for a bath three times. Like the White-eyed vireo I photograph at my sister’s house outside Austin, Texas, this bird bathes “on the fly”. It skims the water then finds a perch where it preens furiously. Since it staged by the watercourse in various places I was able to get a number of good photographs of it.

And finally, we’ve had a number of juvenile Northern flickers that began frequenting the yard for suet during the past month or so, after a total absence of flickers for the earlier part of the summer.  I have been able to obtain very good photos of the flickers, including this female.

I guess that technically it is still summer, but our weather of late is sliding into fall.  I spent about five hours outside Saturday (9/5/2015) and had a considerable number of photos to show for it.  I photographed two noteworthy visitors… a Stellar’s jay and a Black-throated Gray warbler.  It’s probably been over a year since a Stellar’s jay has visited the yard and I can’t understand why.  We seem to have good habitat.  I’ve often thought that the jays we have make an occasional foray across the channel from Guemes since I have friends over there who have them and I seldom see them on our island (Fidalgo).

The second rarity, the Black-throated Gray warbler, was here for an extended time last summer and usually enjoyed bathing in our watercourse several times a day.  We had probably had them in the past but I probably failed to pick them out of all the Black-capped chickadees, of which we have many.  My guess is that this is a juvenile.  There are at least two in the yard at the same time, and possibly more.

Other birds I photographed… a male Anna’s hummingbird and a White-crowned sparrow.