July Yard Birds

I was disappointed to have to take my Nikon D300S back to the dealer for shipment back to Nikon on Friday.  The traffic to and from Seattle was absolutely horrible and what under good circumstances could have been done in about three hours took almost five hours!  The camera is having the same problems as when it was previously sent to Nikon in June... failure to recall and/or manipulate images on the screen.  In addition the camera was refusing to work at all with a Compact Flash card inserted.  Fortunately the camera has two different card slots for different cards so I could continue to take photos until I took the camera in for repair.  However in one sense it's not a tragedy... I still have thousands of unprocessed images so this will force me to concentrate on processing images instead of generating more images. 

These photos were taken in the yard on 7/11 of this year. 

The crocosmia is still in bloom and continues to attract hummingbirds (such as this female Rufous), but the blooms on our best plant for photography won't last much longer. The male Rufous hummingbirds have been gone for several weeks now and any we see from now on will be products of this year's broods. 

A male House finch...

And the bane of my existence... this year's crop of European starlings.  They seem to range in color from a very light ash-gray to almost black.  I've been experimenting with various ways to discourage the starlings from my inverted suet feeders but they are very resourceful and persistent.  I've cut down on the amount of suet they can get but have been stymied in my efforts to cut them off completely.  I would just remove the suet until they leave for the season but there are too many other birds that utilize the suet, including Downy woodpeckers, Hairy woodpeckers (!), Red-breasted nuthatches, Chestnut-backed chickadees, Black-capped chickadees and Northern flickers.  The House sparrows also access the feeders but don't seem to get as much suet. 

We had a garage sale yesterday and spent most of the morning in a different area of the yard than usual.  We had a group of three Brown creepers (uncommon for the last several weeks) and a single young Black-headed grosbeak who seemed to have been abandoned by its parents.  It came to the yard twice yesterday  and eyed the birds on the suet feeder once but seemed oblivious to the platform feeder I put up each season specifically for the grosbeaks.  It was obvious when the young grosbeak was in the area... it had a soft call that it kept repeating the entire time it was here.