Birdapalooza: Birds, New & Old

Date: May 30, 2009

Time: 5:30-6:00 p.m.
Weather: Partly Cloudy, 63°F, 39% Humidity, Wind: From WSW @ 24 mph, gusting to 35 mph; feels like 63°F.
Location: The backyard of our home in upstate New York.


The Chipping Sparrow (Spizella passerina) sure seem to enjoy the new suet holder--one which does manage to keep the starving squirrels at bay!
Bird Species/Markings/Features: One Chipping Sparrow(Spizella passerina), pictured above, another frequent Summer visitor to our feeders. Just this morning, while talking with me on the phone from our backyard, my wife noted to me that the feeder area resembled a "sparrow/chickadee farm!"


Look for Gray Catbirds (Dumetella carolinensis), like this one seen here hiding in the trees above the feeder, in dense tangles of shrubs, small trees, and vines, along forest edges, streamside thickets, old fields, and fencerows.
The new visitor, one adult, male Gray Catbird (Dumetella carolinensis). This took Anne and I few minutes to identify--and my photo does this shy character little justice, but after watching its behavior (and guided my the field book), its identity all came into picture pretty quickly. "A medium-sized, slender songbird with a long, rounded, black tail and a narrow, straight bill (thrush-like). Catbirds are fairly long legged and have broad, rounded wings." Most noticeable was the manner in which its tail "flicks" up and down, much like a cat.


A male American Goldfinch (Carduelis tristis), very common at our
feeders, snack on thistle.
One American Goldfinch (Carduelis tristis); though the goldfinch’s main natural habitats are weedy fields and floodplains, they are extremely common nearly year round at our thistle feeder.)

Sights/Sounds/Activities: There was very little song activity despite the "traffic." Upon noticing the catbird, I went out to snap the pictures and listen intently for a distinctive call with which I might (at some future date--the CD of Bird Songs was in my player at work!) identify them. Ironically, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds website specifically identifies that the Gray Catbird call is among the easiest to identify, noting that "If you’re convinced you’ll never be able to learn bird calls, start with the Gray Catbird. Once you’ve heard its catty mew you won’t forget it."

Notes: Yesterday afternoon upon returning from my son's baseball double header, and after noting that Anne had planted our "crops" for the season, I set about refilling all of our feeders. This yielded fairly immediate results, not the least of which was the arrival of a bird we had not (in our three years or so of actually "watching," a new arrival to the backyard party.

Much in the same fashion that we have identified all prior newbies (a variety of woodpeckers and finches) and by using both a pair binoculars kept at the kitchen counter and a somewhat faded orange-ish copy of Stan Tekiela's Birds of New York Field Guide, we play ornithologist to determine who was who and what was what.

Breathe in, breathe out... YOU AND I ARE ALIVE!