The image posted above is of the Bird of the Month. I’m sure you can see why it was selected! I envision this bird as being the basis for something out of a future Star Wars movie or maybe a remake of A Boy and His Dog (look it up, or better yet watch the movie!). The runner-up appears at the end of this post. I don’t envision this being a monthly feature, but in the case of the serendipity of the birding world it makes some sense.
My original intent was to begin posting a few of the photos I took on a trip to Point Reyes National Seashore (in CA) in mid-June, but these photos taken in my yard were just too good to let go. And since I’ve brought up yard birding, this is a good time for a report.
It’s been a somewhat disappointing year for birding in the yard. I’m alarmed by the decrease in the number of warbler visits as well as occasional migrants… Red crossbills, Western tanagers, Cedar waxwings, and vireos. While we have at least one pair of California quail visiting the yard, to date they haven’t shown up with any chicks. We had a pair of Dark-eyed juncos that reared a Brown-headed cowbird (for the second year in a row), hardly a success story. On the other hand, we have a lot of birds in the yard and they are eating us out of house and home. I can’t seem to discourage the European starlings or the House sparrows that spend most of the days in the yard. On July 11, I counted five chickadees on a half-full peanut tube feeder, then upon heading back into the house saw another such feeder with six chickadees on it! The significance of the ‘half-full’ modifier is that the birds only have access to about half the feeder’s surface area and food capacity, so all the chickadees were crowded into quite a small space. And we have a pair of Black-headed grosbeaks who have apparently successfully reared a pair of young.
On July 12, sadly we had a pair of window kills… a juvenile Northern flicker and a Chestnut-backed chickadee.
I’m concerned that the dearth of interesting migrants may have been discouraged by the pulling of ivy in the adjacent City parkland (which needed to be done). What didn’t need to be done, but was apparently done without public comment, is a frisbee golf course was installed in a huge section of the parkland. One of the justifications for the installation was that the users would help trample the English ivy which grows there, but I can tell you that the ivy will be virtually unaffected. What will be affected are the ferns, mushrooms and other more delicate plants that grow there. And whether this disturbance has anything to do with the diversion of birds we normally see, I just can’t say. All I know is that the number of migrant species (some of which are summer breeders here) are drastically down this year.
Earlier in this post I promised a photo of the runner-up Bird of the Month. Here it is…
