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.