After some long hours in the yard in June and July with few relatively rare birds, I had a very nice day on July 26… at a cost of several hours of yard birding I took about 350 bird photos and it has taken me a couple of days to process the photos. I’ll share some of those photos…

I had three different species of warblers enter the yard. The first was a female Wilson’s warbler, normally our most common warbler but in short supply this year.

The next warbler to appear was an Orange-crowned warbler. One actually entered the yard twice but the second time was fairly late in the day and I was unable to get photos of the second visit.

The third warbler visitor was a male Yellow-rumped (Audubon’s) warbler. I normally eschew posting birds at feeders but to document all three species I’m posting one of the only two photos I was able to obtain. This bird came to a hanging bird bath and is probably not the same bird that was an almost daily visitor to our water feature this spring.

We had several visits from either a female or juvenile Black-headed grosbeak. I think at least one visitor was a juvenile due to its apparent unfamiliarity with our bird feeders.

For the first time ever I managed to get two Brown creepers in the same photograph (not shown here). I suspect that one was a juvenile due to its eagerness to explore various areas of the yard.

We have at least a couple of juvenile Spotted towhees that visit the yard. I love these juveniles and marvel at how little they resemble their parents at this stage of their development.

We had at least three coveys of California quail regularly visiting the yard but we may be down to only one covey composed of larger chicks at this point.

And finally, we had a juvenile (adult pictured here) Red-breasted nuthatch make numerous visits to our watercourse. I don’t think it ever worked up the courage to actually bathe or even drink, but it spent considerable time accessing staging sticks and rocks around the watercourse and trying to avoid other bathers.

After a June with relatively few interesting visitors, I had a very interesting July 4, 2021, afternoon.    

If my relatively unreliable short-term memory serves me correctly, I remember only about three warbler visits during the month of June.  One of the visits was of a pair of Yellow-rumped warblers that appeared and spent a brief amount of time in the yard before leaving.  But my first interesting bird on Independence Day was a male Yellow-rumped (Audubon’s) warbler that entered the watercourse for a bath.  I wasn’t able to obtain any good photos, but I have many from one that had been an almost daily visitor this past spring.  

While passing time in the yard I photographed an Eastern Gray squirrel eating green madrone berries while hanging upside down.  I have seen birds eating the berries but this is the first time I’ve seen a squirrel doing it.  

We had a visit from a Brown creeper, a regular visitor during the spring but rarer during the summer.  These birds fascinate me and I always enjoy seeing and photographing them.  

We’ve had visits from Black-headed grosbeaks since late spring.  The visits are always irregular and are usually focused on a small platform feeder or inverted suet feeder.  On this day we had at least two visits from a male.

The next interesting visitor was an Orange-crowned warbler, normally a common visitor to the yard but rather rare during the spring migration this year.     

Our next visitor was a new species, which as the discoverer traditionally gives me naming rights!   I named it the Anacortes Tailless Towhee.  

Next up, an adorable Warbling vireo which visited the watercourse but never accessed the water.    

If this wasn’t enough, a Hutton’s vireo, which closely resembles a Ruby-crowned kinglet, paid us a visit.  I initially thought the bird was a kinglet but realized my mistake once I began  processing my photos.  

We’ve had at least three and quite possibly more coveys of California quail parade through the yard this summer.  The only way we can tell the difference in coveys is by the size and number of chicks, but trying to count the chicks is an almost impossible task as they dart around into and out of cover.  And the number in the covey tends to decline day after day as chicks are lost to predators.  This year use have as numerous a population as we’ve had in several years.

In early July we had an accipiter make a pass at a covey but all the chicks managed to dart into our brush pile for safety. I expected that once an accipiter had discovered the quail in our yard it would be a regular visitor but I’ve seen it only that once.

By the end of the day (just before 8pm) I had taken 275 photos in approximately four hours of birding in the yard. I had photographed visits from two species of warblers, two species of vireos, Black-headed grosbeak(s), a creeper, House wrens feeding young and one of our coveys of quail… along with a host of other species.