Short posts highlighting a recent subject
Gray Catbirds can’t pass up ripe fall berries. In this case native American Beautyberry berries. Gray Catbirds are not alone. Birds, especially migrants, use the high fat & nutrient content of berries they co-evolved with. These nutrients help resident species prepare for winter. They also aid migratory species successfully make their trips back to tropical […]
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Barred Owls are busy in the fall. They start or renew pair bonds and reclaim nesting sites. Young adults build new nesting sites. All this activity is hard to miss because there is a lot of communication between pairs and between young interlopers. It is the hooting season. This is all in preparation for an […]
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Swainson’s Thrushes, aka Olive-backed Thrushes, hopefully Olive-backed replaces Swainson’s in the coming removal of eponymous English names by the American Ornithological Society (AOS). It is easy to miss Olive-backed Thrushes in their deep-forest, forest floor haunts until they sing. Like their forest thrush taxonomic cousins they have a flutelike upward-spiraling ethereal song.But even then you […]
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An immature – yellow eyes & brown streaking – Cooper’s Hawk in our urban, deep inside-the-perimeter of Atlanta yard. This is increasingly common urban occurrence. Cooper’s Hawks are overall short to medium distance migrants. But there is growing evidence that during dispersal if a young adult emigrates to an urban setting they tend to stay […]
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There is nothing a Summer Tanager, in this case a fall migrating female, enjoys more than a fat wasp (or bee). But what about the stinger? They catch their victim in the air, take it back to a branch, & roughly rub it on the bark to remove the stinger. Then down the hatch. This […]
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It is not a coincidence that the birds featured in this post are on a rotting stump in our yard. We leave stumps & snags – when safe – for the very reasons tree removal companies tell us not to: To attract ‘pests’. Pests like the wasps, beetles, spiders, ants and caterpillars that live in […]
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Eastern Towhees are sparrows and an exception to the sparrow look of ‘Little Brown Jobs’. Eastern Towhees and Spotted Towhees of the western North America were considered one species, Rufous-sided Towhee, until 1995. Famous for their “drink-your-tea” song, a group of towhees are called a “teapot”. Common and frequently heard across their range, but not […]
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Herons, like Great Blue, Green, Night, Little, are known for their slow and deliberate hunting and fishing styles. Then there are the Tri-colored Herons. Tri-colored Herons frenetically ‘dance’ when fishing. Their signature first move is the Canopy. They form a canopy by spreading their wings to create a large shadow on the water’s surface. When […]
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