By early September the number of fall migrants arriving in the yard have slowed to a trickle… or even less. I am now spending as much as a couple of hours a day sitting in the yard with no sightings at all. I’ve at least temporarily solved my House sparrow problem. I’ve greatly reduced the number of feeders and the kinds of food I am putting out. This has discouraged sparrows but it has also resulted in other birds departing. The lack of food should not affect migrants because they don’t expect food and generally wouldn’t be attracted to the food (sunflower seed, peanuts and suet) that i have in my feeders. But… they might skip the yard because of the lack of bird activity. However they might also be put off by the 20-30 House sparrows that were almost continuously in the yard a week or so ago.

On September 6, 2021, I logged a single migrant… a female Wilson’s warbler. She was very accommodating, flitting around the watercourse for maybe about ten minutes. I have a variety of staging objects (bushes, sticks and rocks) located around the watercourse which gives birds inviting places to explore and perch. It gave me the opportunity to take 87 photos, and I’m almost (but not quite) embarrassed to say that I retained 27 after processing. Here’s my case as to why…

These first two photos are from several that I consider the best.

These next two photos are ones that I decided to retain even though I rated them among the lowest of those I retained.

By way of explanation regarding photo quality, I export all of these photos from Adobe Lightroom at 4MP, so what gets posted on this website doesn’t truly reflect the quality of the original photos. ALL of these photos are of a considerably reduced quality from those on my computer.