My wife and I stopped by our neighborhood bat house this past week, to catch the evening fly out that happens around 9PM this time of year. Click on any image for full screen view. Some edge out onto the vertical stone chimney before launching into the night.
We saw one bat fly back down the chimney as we watched. I wonder if that was a smaller species that may be nesting there and came back to feed the young.
BIRDS OF MID-SUMMER
There are now young birds of the year all around us. This morning I saw speckled-chested young robin wing-flapping on a horizontal oak branch. One of its parents brought it a caterpillar. At Wennerberg Park yesterday I saw a young Savanna Sparrow who was so surprised at seeing two large mammals it followed along in the bushes staring at the dog and me. Just twenty feet further on we saw a young Common Yellowthroat who was equally amazed at such large, shuffling critters in its view. In the local marshes there are young mallards by the dozen. Flocks of feeding swallows at Yamhill Sewer Ponds included three species and maybe newly airborne birds. The species were Cliff, Barn and Northern Rough-winged. A family of Black-capped Chickadees comes several times daily into our garden to feed. Along all the forest edges hereabouts I know run into two or more wood-pewees, but cannot tell young from adult though I have seen the latter fly in to feed the former. Otherwise they all look alike from the ground.
Pewee…in lower image the bird was giving its wheezy calls.
Northern Rough-winged Swallows gathering insects off the sewer pond surface.
Queen Anne’s lace:
I am curious, yellow..throat. “Gee, never seen such a bug creature before…”
Young scrub-jay:
Long before there was a world wide web, or Internet if you please, this guy’s ancestors were true web masters:
Below, harrier circling at the north edge of McMinnville:
The celestial question mark: sliver of moon and the Venus’s royal presence below.
FINCH GALLERY
In order: four American Goldfinch images; five House Finch images (the first three are adult male, last two of juveniles); one Lesser Goldfinch in a thistle seed paradise:
Towheeblog 
Leave a Reply