I spent considerable time in the yard birding on October 17, 2020. The day was heavily overcast and quite cool sitting with little activity on my part. My birding day got started when we returned from breakfast/farmers market and I saw a bird fly from the yard high into one of the fir trees. I could see nothing about the bird other than its fight path due to lower light conditions and backlighting, but the flight path was one often taken by Red crossbills exiting the yard. This motivated me to retrieve my camera and have a seat outside.

Immediately after sitting a bird few across the yard and landed in a grove of young fir trees. Fortunately I had a window to see through the limbs and realized that it was a male Red-breasted Sapsucker... I had seen one at a friends’s house in the neighborhood the previous week. It’s a very rare bird here for us and maybe only the second one I can remember seeing in the yard in the twelve years we’ve lived at this location.

I didn’t have to wait long for the crossbills! A male Red crossbill soon showed above the watercourse and he was soon followed by the rest of his group.

We have neighbors who called and said they were overrun with Pine siskins, and the group apparently finally made it to our yard. At one time there were probably at least 20 Pine siskins in and around the watercourse with more scattered in the trees around the yard. These two photos highlight what can be the color variation within the species, perhaps between the sexes.

Later I got several nice photos of this Black-capped chickadee above the watercourse.

The last birds I’ll showcase were male House finches. We seem to have considerably more males than females around the yard. (I can’t be sure these two photos aren’t of the same bird.)