Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What's At Your Feeder?

My wife, and my Petersons came home last night. Looked yellow head up and he is called the Yellow Headed Blackbird. Peterson shows his year round range to include my home and lists his appearance as "fairly common". Hmmm
I've lived in this area for 30 of my last 40 years, and graduated high school here farther back than that. As mentioned Yellow Head is a first for me.

On the same page is the eastern meadowlark. listed as "uncommon to fairly common" These are so common here that I barely notice them and never mention them as a bird I've seen. I can walk out the door pretty much any day of the year and I'll see or hear one within a couple of minutes.

Disparities in authoritative books like this make me wonder. To be fair, I'm at the far end of Yellow Heads range.

And I too watched The Big Year last night.

Not my typical movie but enjoyable

[quote=renegade50]Okay.
As much as I have given some of you guys a hard time about humming birds.

I have never killed one.
But I have back handed one bugging me Turkey hunting several years ago.

This is the 2nd year "mrs robin"has came back to this nest

This was her 1st hatch this year, about 2 weeks ago the young flew the coop
Their were 3 of em.



She is currently sitting on a new clutch of eggs .
At night when I take the 3 dogs out for their bedtime piss one at a time, it dont phase her at all.

Last year when she had established the nest.
She had one set of young .
Then another.
One evening my youngest daughter was home from college
Came running down stairs and said a big snake was on the ledge and on top of the nest. And scared the hell outta her when she came home.

Mutha fugging 6ft long black racer full of baby birds.

Got my machete.
Flicked that prick off the ledge with it.
Fugging thing couldn't move very fast on the lawn with a belly full of baby robins
I lopped that fuggers head off 1st chop.
Threw the SOB head and body in the woods across my fence.

Coksucker ate 4 baby robins.
But the amazing thing was it went almost 8ft up a brick wall
to get at that nest.

I hate snakes.........

I only kill Turkey and doves.....

Not dumb humming birds....[/q
You need one of these in the neighborhood...

Texas has more DIFFERENT kind of birds than any other state, either living in it or migrating across it, because we are so wide and have so many different habitats somewhere in the state. As to more different kind of birds in any one place at any given time, not so much.

In the spring birds piling up on the coast after having flown across the Gulf of Mexico from the Yucatán can be spectacular in bad weather. However since so many birds are heading to the north east from the Yucatán, the coast of Louisiana tends to get better fallouts than does anywhere in Texas. Louisiana being closer to a straight line between two points. On the other hand, good luck finding desert and high mountain species in Louisiana.

Every location is different and best appreciated on its own merits, for example upstate New York in the first two weeks of May can be just incredible. As the birds get closer to their breeding grounds they all start to sing and while you might not get that same huge variety of species in one day as on the Gulf Coast , in that setting in the spring up there with all the trees just beginner by to leaf out it can be beautiful. I miss being up there every Spring..

Migration is complex, when my relatives are seeing orioles grosbeaks and hummingbirds in May up in New York State we still have those same species passing through down here, the ones we are seeing still being more’n 1000 miles or more away from their breeding grounds up in Canada. The ones we still have coming through about now are heading way the heck north to areas still covered in snow, and so are on a different timetable than their New York brethren.

For hummingbird migration you can’t beat the Western states and the Rockies. Especially in the fall. Coming back south the hummingbirds are feeding on wildflowers in high Mountain Meadows. So for them they’re really flying between mountains, these mountains being isolated islands of habitat that they must fly between. Go up in the Sacramento mountains of New Mexico around July 4, when the hummingbirds are already heading back south, hold out a feeder at arms length and you will be instantly surrounded by about 30 hummingbirds who will feed on the feeder until your arm gets tired. I had never seen anything like it.

The short version of all this is, when it comes to the birds it’s best just to appreciate what you got wherever you happen to be.

Don't have a bird feeder up. Neighbor does. Says he has one really fat gopher.

Peterson's was the original bird guide, but that first edition was around sixty or maybe seventy years ago, obviously bird populations change over time and we certainly have a lot more information now, so that may depend on what edition of Petersen's you have and when it was updated.

Also, the range maps and population status indicated in a brief paragraph in any bird guide are attempting to generalize, often across ranges extending 2,000 miles across or more. Within the range, habitat is gonna be the key. Can't throw a rock without hitting a red-winged blackbird in a cattail bed, but you'll see nary a one in the middle of a forest, except maybe rarely passing overhead.

For the most specific info for your location google on "Eastern Meadowlark breeding bird atlas", if your state has one click on that link and you'll see a range map in varying shades, usually of blue, the deeper the blue the more common that bird is in that particular locale,

No need to go so far afield....

Thanks Mike!

Over on the Mississippi today near Savanna IL and Sabula IA... Red headed woodpeckers, Downy woodpeckers, Hummingbird, Baltimore Oriole, Bluebird, White Pelicans, Tundra Swans, Mallards, blue jays, gold finches, house finches, White Egret, Blue Heron, bald eagle, vultures, anadians, Cormorants

And several small shore birds that I simply suck at identifying.

Probably 4-5 warbler types that are impossible to identify

Was looking out the window to at the feeders was a B-Oriole eating the Grape Jelly, a chipmunk ran him off tryed the Jelly made a face and ran off I guess they dont care for Grape jelly!

Mallards again in the morning




In the afternoon, a Mississippi Kite spent awhile on the fence and in the hedges trying to catch the sparrows that flock to my feeders.

Of course the things that really attract birdwatchers are usually tragedies for the birds involved, a bird several hundred miles out of range is a bird with serious problems and unlikely to survive.

Some just inherit faulty migration instincts. Every fall on fishing boats off our West Coast, misdirected songbirds, young of the year, different species from all over North America will land on the boat, rest for a awhile, and then take off again in a doomed attempt to cross the Pacific. Most migrating birds don't get tired like we do, they stay in the air, burn off their fat, then they burn off their own flight muscles and when they run out, simply go down, if they ain't been caught yet by seabirds for whom overwater migration by songbirds is like Christmas.

I've only ever seen one big fallout on the Gulf Coast, prob'ly thirty years ago, we had taken some students camping and fishing on the coast when a major cold front rolled in. Heavy rain, strong north winds, but the kids insisted on fishing anyway so there we were on a lit up fishing jetty near Rockport TX out in it. A few times a minute a little songbird would pass under the lights just above the water just yards from land, trying to make headway. They whip around like the far edge of a flag in a strong wind. Most I couldn't tell, but Eastern Kingbirds could be told by the white tips on their tails. Next morning every tree and bush festooned with songbirds, clouds of chimney swifts and swallows flying around at waist height, and thousands upon thousands of drowned birds rolling in the tide.

Earlier this month a pretty good turnout of migrants at Corpus Christi, one of which was a way out-of range Hermit Warbler (native to the Pacific Northwest). Hermit Warblers breed in conifers, migrate down the North American mountain chains in high mountain conifers, and winter in conifers in the Mountains of Mexico and Central America. In the spring they follow the same path back, conifers all the way. Anyways, a life bird for me. But in this big cemetery that attracts migrants, a bunch of other warblers were feeding well in the live oak woodlands there, except that one hermit was concentrating on two or three yew trees planted there, sorta like conifers, but being non-native harboring few insects. I got a life bird (doesn't happen very often) but the prognosis for that one warbler was grim.

That ain't no Mississippi Kite, that's an adult Cooper's Hawk, at least a couple of years old judging by the deep red irises which means its exceptionally good at what it does (even among Cooper's), which is to catch and kill songbirds.

Had a Road Runner this afternoon. I think he was hunting the hedges where the sparrows hand out that feed at my feeders. I saw him run across the back yard and hop up into the hedge. I walked around to the street side of the hedge and he popped out onto the brick wall, just momentarily, then saw me and darted back in. In the first photo you can see him standing on the brick ledge, about 10 feet from the end of the ledge. If you have a touch screen you can enlarge the photo and see him clearly.

Cool birds.

My son told me we are running a zoo over here at my bird feeders!



I never knew that rabbits were fond of bird seed.



The hen mallard was at the feeder by herself. That tells me that she left her drake to sit on the eggs in her nest. Or worse, the drake has come to a terminal end of life.

Saw my first female Downing Woodpecker this afternoon.

What's At Your Feeder?
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Squirrels mostly.