Towheeblog

We don’t keep a nectar feeder so hummers are only occasional in our garden.  This morning our still-blooming trio of penstemons were visited by a male Anna’s.  Those plants will  likely bloom on until the first hard frost so we can hope he’ll be buzzing back.

Last night a local birder told me she had siskins at her feeders, and images to prove it.  Maybe this means we will have another siskin winter.  Last year: nada.  Two winters ago they out-numbered even the starlings.

There was a flock of Barn Swallows at Joe Dancer this morning.  Don’t they have tickets to their wintering ground?

The one sound we hear daily in our garden is the annoyed honking of the Red-breasted Nuthatches.  When two arrive they dislike one another.  At one point a bright male landed on a platform full of American Goldfinches.  He looked down his sharp beak, perhaps thinking what slow-moving dullards those finches can be.  Some were on the feeder rim but many were outstanding…on the sunflower seeds.  Still RBN found a fine seed, beaked it and flew away to dine in private, away from the nattering finch mob.Regulars at our feeders are the two chickadee species.  Here one shows off his chestnut back:

MY CONFESSION

I’ve become a pusher.  Not as bad as Big Pharma and their opioids, or the vaping vampires and their toxic e-cigs, but pusher nonetheless.  Somewhere inside the corvid brain are receptors aligned to react to nuts in shell.  So I feed that innate appetite…with peanuts in shell.  The scrub-jays cannot resist. Nuts prime for caching.  The nuts go out, the jays come in.  They would probably mow the lawn or carry out the garbage for peanuts…if I could only speak jay-squeak.

ASHLAND SCREECH

Speaking of jays.  They have many strong opinions.  One universal jay-value: hate all owls.  So this morning my friend Shannon Rio checked outside when her local jay-gang started complaining loudly.  Screech-Owl sheltering under her porch roof.

“I am tired, can you tell those loudmouth jays to turn it down, please?”820 NW 19th Street, McMinnville, Yamhill, Oregon, US
Oct 4, 2019
14 species

Eurasian Collared-Dove  7
Anna’s Hummingbird  1
California Scrub-Jay  1
American Crow  2
Black-capped Chickadee  1
Chestnut-backed Chickadee  3
Bushtit  20
Red-breasted Nuthatch  2
House Sparrow  X
House Finch  2
American Goldfinch  11
Dark-eyed Junco  3
Golden-crowned Sparrow  1
Spotted Towhee  1

820 NW 19th Street, McMinnville, Yamhill, Oregon, US
Oct 3, 2019
13 species

Eurasian Collared-Dove  X
California Scrub-Jay  X
Black-capped Chickadee  X
Chestnut-backed Chickadee  X
Red-breasted Nuthatch  X
American Robin  6
Cedar Waxwing  30
House Finch  X
American Goldfinch  X
Dark-eyed Junco  X
White-crowned Sparrow  1
Golden-crowned Sparrow  2
Spotted Towhee  1