Good Morning, Sunday Jan 9, 2021- lots of Birds

Good morning.  

Some of you already know that I have a hobby of taking bird photos in my back yard and in nearby parks and preserves.  Here are a few recent shots of visitors to our yard and trees, or flying by overhead.  Enjoy, and Happy Sunday! -Michele

An adult male Costa's hummingbird at our patio bird batch / fountain. This year we have had many more Costa's in the yard than we've had in years past. We've always had Anna's hummingbirds, and a few black-chinned, and the occasional migrating Rufous, but this winter the Costa's seem to have taken over and in the last few days, I've noticed several juveniles working the feeders. 

One day after Christmas, in late December, I was sitting out back and noticed many large flocks of starlings circling around. We have starlings here, but not usually in such large numbers. As I watched, I noticed a hawk among them, and I couldn't figure out if the Starlings were harassing the hawk or if the hawk was harassing the starlings. They were quite high up and I couldn't tell for certain, but I think it may have been a red-tailed hawk, and they prefer rodents for food, but if it was a Cooper's hawk, 

it could have been hunting them. 

We have had a few hawks around lately stalking the feeders. Most frequently a Sharp-Shinned Hawk. They look very much like Cooper's hawks with very slight differences, and I'm still not very good at telling them apart. On January 3rd, this beautiful hawk visited several times, both in our olive tree, and then in the neighbor's mulberry tree as you see here. It took some time to stretch and do some preening, showing off some of the patterns in its tail and wing feathers. Beautiful raptor.  I believe this is the Sharp-Shinned hawk again. 

One of my favorite winter visitors to the yard are the yellow-rumped warblers, like this one visiting our patio railing. This looks like a Audubon non-breeding adult female, but there are a lot of variations and I'm no expert. Depending on weather, they usually start arriving in early October, and leave in late April. They are shy insect eaters mainly, and travel alone, stopping by to drink from my bird baths, take the occasional bath,

  and hunt for bugs in the trees. Sweet little birds, I look for them 

when I hear their wispy little calls. 

And in one of the chaste trees on a gray day.

Another favorite winter visitor is the dark-eyed junco, this one was 

foraging on on the wall on Dec 28. 

Nearly every morning our feeders are full of house finches, lesser goldfinches and house sparrow. Th finches all seem to prefer the nyjer and sun-chip feeders and the sparrows prefer the mixed millet feeder at the other end of the yard. 

We usually have a lot more white-crowned sparrows in the winter, but this year they've been a bit scarce. I saw more of them in Nov and Dec, but lately very few. This morning however, I went outside while it was still somewhat dark and noticed I'd startled one below the millet feeder. They prefer to forage on the ground, or the wall 

as this juvenile was doing on Dec 28th. 

I'm not a top photographer with the most top end equipment, but I do enjoy it. I have so many more photos, but that is enough for now.