A Great Birding Week

I've had another really exciting week in the yard.  While no single day equaled my previous post (regarding Sunday, Aug 26), there have been lots of avian visitors to the yard.  I had initially planned to chronicle individual experiences with some of the species but there's been so much activity that I have lost track, so I'll just show some photos.

Sightings of warblers in our yard in the summer is quite rare but by the end of last week I was seeing 8-10 warbler visits per day.  I'm thankful for the photos I've been able to get but somewhat frustrated by those visits I was unable to record.  Warblers are very active and difficult to photograph due to their constant activity.  If they don't spend a little time in the watercourse I generally miss the opportunity to photograph them.

My photography has been helped by the very good weather days we've had recently, and I'm generally spending 4-5 hours in the yard and another couple of hours processing photographs.  For the most part I've been able to keep up with the processing of photo counts approaching 200/day.

And just this past week I've added two new yard birds to my list.  A pair of Stellar's jays flew into the very top of our tallest fir tree for a very brief visit.   When we lived a few blocks down the street we used to see them 3-4 times a year, but I had never seen them for the time we've lived in our current house.

Our second new yard bird was a little rarer.  It was one of the small flycatchers... I've sent a couple of marginal photos to friends for a hopeful ID.   

So enough about the process... let's get to the birds!

Pictured here is an Anna's hummingbird and I would guess it's the product of this year's breeding.  I'm not going to try to guess the sex.  

This is the reason I'm not going to try to guess the sex of the Anna's pictured above.  I at first assumed that I had photographed a female in the photo below, but upon more careful examination of the photo I believe that it is a juvenile male as evidenced by the slight coloration on the head and throat... but I'm always open to comments!  

 This is what I believe to be the single male Red crossbill that visits the watercourse (occasionally with its mate) several times a day.  These birds are relatively shy and are experts at getting to the watercourse undetected.  If you want to see something really interesting, double-click on this image and examine the detail in the feathers and coloration. 

This is the pair of Eurasian Collared doves that have now made about three visits to the yard over the past two to three weeks.  I was excited to get a new species for the yard and it is now nice to have some photos, but I am not excited about getting these things started.  

 A female Wilson's warbler visiting the watercourse...

One of at least two female Western tanagers that has been a regular visitor to the watercourse over the past couple of weeks. 

And finally, a Pine siskin.  I'm not sure why this particular bird looked strange to me, but I've seen and photographed a lot of Pine siskins and there was something about this bird that looked different.  At first I didn't even recognize it as a siskin until it finally revealed a little of the yellow on the edge of the wing.