The afternoon of February 6, 2023, offered broken overcast skies and enough light to make photography worthwhile. I had some choices about how to spend my time around mid afternoon and I decided, on seeing a female Varied thrush in the yard, to spend a little time with photography.

I first photographed a male Anna’s hummingbird in the yard, occasionally mixing it up with another hummingbird. In this photo he’s watching “his” feeder.

Next up was the aforementioned female Varied thrush I had seen earlier. The thrushes have been regular visitors to the yard for the past couple of months, with one or more females being much more frequent visitors than males. They will probably soon return to the mountains for the spring/summer season.

We have one or more flocks of Bushtits visiting the yard several times a day with 10-12 hanging off an inverted suet feeder at one time. This female was part of the group.

But hidden in the mayhem of House sparrows, Golden-crowned sparrows and Dark-eyed juncos was a special visitor that I was lucky to be able to pick out of the crowd… a White-throated sparrow! This is a VERY rare visitor to our yard, having ben seen on only one previous occasion. (See my prior 2022 Yard Sparrows blog posted January 3, 2023.)

ADDENDUM: I saw and photographed two separate visits to the yard of a White-throated sparrow. At the time I was photographing the second visit it seemed to me that the bird’s bib wasn’t as bright, but since the species was such a rare visitor I assumed that the same bird had visited twice. I took many photos of the visitor and in processing the photos the images are displayed in sequential order, not facilitating comparison unless I take special steps to do so.

This evening I was reviewing my post and I had included a photo from each visit. In my post the photos appeared next to each other and I realized that indeed, I had photographed two different White-throated sparrows!!! See for yourself… carefully compare the two photos!