A Good Year for Birds

Where we live there are lots of birds.  Some years we see more birds in the yard than others.  If we have the bird feeder out, we tend to see more birds.  This has been a good year, we've had the feeder out and tried to keep it filled all summer. And so we've had lots of birds in the yard this year.  And a bigger variety than seemed normal, as well.  They are elusive, they don't tend to sit still very long, so getting a decent picture is sometimes difficult.  But we have managed to get a few.

We've had nuthatches, they're smaller.  We've actually had a couple of different kinds of nuthatches.

The white-breasted nuthatch and red-breasted nuthatches.

We've had cardinals, they tended to come in the early spring but then we didn't see so many.  They must have elected to build their nest elsewhere.

But still, they're fun to see.  One year we did have a pair of cardinals build their nest in our yard.  That was fun.  We see blue-jays as well, but not very long and they are hard to photograph. Makes me wonder if they're just passing through as they migrate on elsewhere.

A new bird this year was a family of catbirds.  They did build a nest in our yard and raise a family, the same bush the cardinals had picked years before.  It was obvious how they got their name, their call sounds a lot like a cat.

And little black-capped chickadees, we usually see lots of them but they don't sit still long.

They tend to come to the feeder, grab some seed, and then fly off somewhere else to eat it.  So they go back and forth, between nearby trees and shrubs, and the feeder a lot.

All that activity at the feeders means lot of seed getting knocked onto the ground below the feeders.  So that's where we tended to see the squirrels, digging in the grass for the seed.  Enough this year that they didn't try getting directly into the feeders like they do some years.  That was nice.  

Never a shortage of squirrels in our yard, much to the delight of the dog that's staying with us. He likes to chase them but, of course, he's never gotten even close to catching any.  They are hands down way faster than he is.