You may have noticed that I haven’t posted to my blog in a while. There are several reasons for this.

First of all, as I mentioned in my last post, I broke my right ankle in mid-June and was quite immobile for the month that I had to wear a boot. I couldn’t drive with the boot (on my right foot) so I was mainly confined to our house during that time.

Second, in early July my Nikon 200-400mm f4.0 lens began making unusual noises when focusing. I want through this about five years ago and the problem was the focusing motor(s) inside the lens. The lens needed to be sent to Nikon for repair, and like the last time this happened, the needed parts apparently were’t on hand. So as of early August my lens sits languishing on some technician’s desk in LA waiting for parts. In some ways the timing was good.

Which brings me to the third reason… except for juveniles being fed in the yard, things are relatively uninteresting from the viewpoint of variety of species. For the most part it’s the same old birds day after day… with a few exceptions, which I’ll detail below.

And there’s even a fourth reason for not posting… I engaged a friend with more technical experience than I to try to fix a distribution problem with my blog. Some of you signed up to be notified by email when I post a new blog, but something happened to that feature when I requested assistance from the site host. So as of this writing you apparently can’t sign up for notifications and if you signed up previously you probably aren’t getting them.

So I’m eagerly awaiting the repair of my primary birding lens, trying to make do with a Nikon 18-200mm lens… kind like bear hunting with a BB gun! This crisis has motivated me to purchase a backup lens, which if it becomes available and I can purchase one may become my primary birding lens.

Enough of my woes! The raccoon pictured at the top of this post was a visitor on July 31, 2020. I saw it skulking around the edge of the yard and was able to get prepared in the event it decided to come for water. Bingo! It was just about the perfect distance for the 200mm zoom.

In my last post featuring seasonal juveniles I should have included one other juvenile bird… a Brown-headed cowbird. Fortunately we haven’t had many in the yard this year, but on August 2, 2020 I observed an adult Spotted towhee feeding a cowbird chick. This photo of a cowbird chick was taken May 29.

Other news this month:

We have a male Hairy woodpecker visiting the yard, definitely a rarity considering observations here at the house over the past few years. We had one last fall/winter but it disappeared during breeding season. Now it (or a relative) is back!

We have at least two movies of California quail visiting the yard. One covey has about 8-10 ‘teenagers’, the males of which are just beginning to show their facial markings. The other covey, much younger chicks, numbers about 10-12.

During July we had two widely-spaced visits by male Audubon Yellow-rumped warblers.

I have been anxiously anticipating visits by Cedar waxwings this summer. Finally, on July 29,30 and 31 (one visit per day) we had one show up at the watercourse. Sorry… no lens, no photos!