Thursday, April 30, 2020 

I began this day thinking that nothing could eclipse the previous day’s birding/photography, but I was wrong. Here’s an overview of the day’s sightings and photography:

In the yard from about 12noon until 5pm, then again briefly from about 6:00-6:30pm.

Photos:630  

Warblers:

• Orange-crowned 
• Wilson’s (male) 
• Yellow-rumped Audubon (both males) 
• Black-throated Gray (first of season) 
• Townsend’s (first of season) 

I’ll begin with the Orange-crowned warbler, since it mustered the most visits. I estimate the species made at least 20 visits to the yard and there were at least a couple of visits when multiple representatives of the species were in the yard at the same time.

While this visitor is not a migrant, I always enjoy getting photos because it’s not a frequent visitor to the watercourse and I don’t like to photograph birds on feeders. It’s a Red-breasted nuthatch. This one is a little on the pale side.

Another frequent visitor was the Wilson’s warbler, all of which were male.

We has visits from two male Yellow-rumped warblers but I was unable to get anything but a record shot of one of them. I noticed this one high in a fir tree overhead.

We had a single visit from a Townsend’s warbler, a female.

Our next special visitor was a male Black-headed grosbeak, our first of the season.

Next up, a Ruby-crowned kinglet. This bird, and its cousin the Golden-crowned kinglet (not pictured), are normally fairly common in the yard during the winter months. This past winter however, they were conspicuously absent.

Our next special visitor, and a rare migrant to our yard, was a female Black-throated Gray warbler. This was the first of the season for this visitor and I only managed one photo, which due to quality I refer to as a “record shot”. It’s not a good photo but it’s a record the the bird was in the yard.

I’ll feature a couple of Rufous hummingbirds next. First the female feeding on the blossoms of an evergreen huckleberry.

A male Rufous hummingbird hovering above the watercourse. I never get tired of photographing these situations due to the challenge of the moving bird and the fine details of the bird’s feathers. And due to the birds’ rapid wingbeats the result you obtain is serendipity.

This is a Pacific Slope flycatcher. Since this bird is extremely rare in the yard, I suspect that it is the same one that visited the previous day.

Finally, a very unexpected visitor to the yard. I looked up from whatever I was doing to see a male Western tanager land in a madrone tree directly in front of me. Unfortunately the bird was backlit to some extent but I managed over a dozen photos before it decided to move on.

April 29, 2020, was to be maybe the best bird photography day I’ve had while living here (since 2008). I began birding about 11am and continued until about 3pm, taking 503 photographs and logging two first of season migrants and one very special visitor. For a change of pace, most of the photographs (by far) were special visitors (migrants) with few photos taken of the more common yard birds that have gotten me through the past several months.

My intention for this spring migration was to log the number of visits per day by the migrants, but I was overwhelmed by the birds and realize that I can’t perform photography and log birds at the same time. And there were many times when I had to make a decision about which of the migrants I wanted to photograph when more than one species was in the yard at the same time.

I’ll start with a photo of a male Rufous hummingbird taking a bath in the watercourse. This bird makes several trips a day to the watercourse for a bath, and although this isn’t a frontal photo, I enjoy viewing the bird’s wings and tail, views you don’t often get to examine in the field.

New photos of the species in the prior post, a female Yellow-rumped warbler of the Myrtle race.

Early in the day a very special visitor… a Pacific Slope flycatcher! When photographing this bird I initially thought it was a vireo, and it added to my tentative identification by “dip-bathing” in the watercourse. In processing the photos I realized that it probably wasn’t a vireo and sought confirmation of the specific flycatcher ID from a more a knowledgable birding friend,.

Now another bird I can’t recall ever having seen in the yard, a male Yellow-rumped warbler of the Myrtle’s race. (Compare with the female pictured above.) Note the white throat and the yellow crown.

Another bird making its seasonal debut here in the yard was the male Wilson’s warbler. In past years I considered the Wilson’s warbler to be our most frequent visitor, but its been far eclipsed by the Orange-crowned warblers this year.

Before I move from the subject of warblers, I’ll display a couple of images of this year’s most frequent warbler visitor… the Orange-crowned warbler.

This wrapped up the unusual, migrant and ‘first of season’ birds for the day, but not the photography. This female Rufous hummingbird was accessing one of our madrone trees.

And for contrast, here’s a female Anna’s hummingbird trying to decide whether or not to enter the watercourse.

Although in the neighborhood, Eurasian Collared doves have stayed out of our yard until recently. Several months ago raptors got two in the vicinity of our house. Now there are at least two pairs back visiting the yard.

But it wasn’t over quite yet! Near the end of the day we had a Brown creeper, a fairly rare visitor, enter the yard and take a tour of watercourses, giving me an unusual number of opportunities to photograph this visitor.

This was probably the best birding photography day I’ve had since we lived here (2008), and I thought that things couldn’t get any better. I was WRONG!