Posted on 09/19/2019 7:58:43 PM PDT by Java4Jay
Very entertaining bird.
We have one that loves to get into everything, like an 8 week puppy, with wings!
Our resident crow can say HI Crow!
He bows (?) after feeding a few treats, and says "crow".
Spends all day with his siblings/buddies, then flies directly into the garage to his nightly roost.
I mentioned my chickadee bird house above. Last summer a family successfully nested in it and I watched the babies fledge throughout the morning and afternoon. In the afternoon after I thought all the babies had gone, I watched as a blue jay stuck his head into the nest box until I scared him away. Two days later when I went out to clean out the box, I found a fifth baby that was dead by having its eyes pecked out by that damn jay. They are now on my assassination list along with the sparrows, grackles and starlings......
Apparently this year she had many more than last year and gave the caterpillars out to many of her garden club friends...........She tagged those too.
How kind! :)
No, I meant that it’s illegal to take one for a pet. They’re included in the Migratory Bird Act.
I can’t concentrate on reading this because of the cacophony of tweeting outside my open door.
Yikes! Imagine that happening in an area where there’s a lot of dry vegetation! Or right next to a busy roadway, like the turbines down in Atlantic City.
My cousin grew up in California and he had one when he was a teenager. It would follow him to school each day then meet him when he got out of school and follow him home.
He had it for several years until it probably got interested in female crows and left. Jon said he would occasionally see it in the neighborhood......
The trap was successful but I stopped using it when I discovered a chickadee dead inside the box.
So I removed the front of the box and replaced it with another that had a smaller entrance hole that only the chickadees could enter. That solved the problem with the sparrows.........
I found the best way to deal with the sparrows is with a .177 pellet rifle as they feast on the bird seed on the ground under the bird feeder.......Same with the grackles who travel in flocks and will occasionally find my feeder and chase the song birds way......
As for the shot sparrows, there is a feral cat around my house who hides in bushes on the back of the house behind me. I call her my "retriever" cat since within 5 minutes of a successful sparrow kill, she comes running out to pick it up and take it away........
As for the shot grackles, she sniffs them then turns and walks away. That's weird, since they would be a bigger meal. Maybe they just stink............
Since I have been shooting the house sparrows, I have noticed a tremendous increase in the numbers of purple finches and house finches........
I haven't seen one in years but knowing their nesting habits, I can understand why. I used to see them when I lived in Detroit since they would nest on the flat roofed buildings that had gravel spread over the tar covering. Out here in the subs, there are very few of those types of buildings that are using tar and gravel
So two years ago I bought and set up an oriole feeder off my back deck and within two weeks a pair showed up and started feeding off it. I was ecstatic.....
They came again last year and this year there were maybe 3 pair coming to the feeder.........
I had to take the feeder down about two weeks ago since it was being taken over by bald faced hornets........Not a problem tho since this is the time of year the orioles migrate back to south America....
Don't know where you live but I had never seen a sand hill crane in my life until a few years ago when I was pheasant hunting up in the thumb area of Michigan.
We heard a honking noise way up in the sky and we just figured it was a flock of geese heading south. So when we looked up, by gosh it was a flock of cranes..........Never saw any since.
That changed back in 2013 when my high school in northern Michigan had a 45 year class reunion. I spent that weekend at a friend's house who lived out in the country on 40 acres and he had a field and valley behind his house. I saw blue birds flying all over the place! At the back of his yard he had a fence post row and each one had a blue bird house on it. I asked him about their occupancy and he said that typically each year half the houses are being used by the blue birds.
As a side note, he called me two days ago and I asked him how the deer population around his house was. He said there's a 10 pointer and a 6 pointer and a few does that he is constantly seeing out in the field.
Then he went into a rant on how the G-damn deer once again destroyed his vegetable garden and the raccoons kept getting his corn.......LOL!
I once asked him why he doesn't shoot the deer from his back deck. Unfortunately Bill had a tough time in Vietnam and he has no desire to shoot a firearm again. So what he does is grant permission to friends to hunt his various properties and they in turn share the venison with him............
It’s the best site anywhere on the web for bird info and knowledge. Their eBird app is just amazing...a true birder’s social network.
Yeah, we had killdeer nesting on top of 3 story flat roofs in Florida. The only nighthawk I’ve seen on the ground in Oregon wasn’t on s nest.
The Merced National Wildlife Refuge encompasses 10,262 acres of wetlands, native grasslands, vernal pools, and riparian areas in California. It was established in 1951 under the Lea Act to attract wintering waterfowl from adjacent farmland where their foraging was causing crop damage. In the last few decades, changes in agricultural practices and refuge management have reduced these wildlife/crop issues. The refuge plays host to the largest wintering populations of lesser sandhill cranes and Ross's geese within the Pacific Flyway. Each autumn over 20,000 cranes and 60,000 arctic nesting geese terminate their annual migrations from Alaska and Canada to make the refuge home for six months. Here they mingle with thousands of other visiting waterfowl, waterbirds and shorebirds making the refuge a true winter phenomenon.If you are ever on the west coast in winter, it is a wonderful place to visit. You can head up the Central Valley and stop at many more National Wildlife Refuges and see more birds than you ever dreamed of.
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