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Birds are pretty awesome, and I like them a lot. We mostly get juncos and chickadees in our yard though Stellar's jays and rufous (I think) hummingbirds pass through pretty frequently too. Probably the most memorable sighting in my yard though was about two years ago when I saw either a Cooper's hawk or a peregrine falcon going to town on a starling right in my front yard. It had just snowed, but after it flew off there was not even a speck of blood visible, just a small pile of feathers. Is is ok to ask taxonomy-related questions here too, or is that beyond the scope of the thread?
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Sep 20, 2013 09:14
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 13:18 |
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BetterLekNextTime posted:I think that's fine- a big part of bird lists is keeping up with the taxonomic changes. OK, maybe that answers my question actually. National Geographic had an article on cassowaries last month, and I was reading more about them on wikipedia. There seems to be some conflicting information about their classification though--the general general cassowary article puts them in the order Struthioniformes, but individual species articles (southern cassowary for instance) lists them as being in Casuariiformes. Is this just an instance of an order being split or of two orders being combined?
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Sep 20, 2013 19:19
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Bird fans, my wife and I just witnessed a raptor of some sort swoop in and nab the squirrel my wife had been watching across the street. I've looked through my field guides though, and I'm not sure what it was. It was mostly brown with some mottling on the back, with a prominent white patch on the neck and upper chest. It looked like some pictures of juvenile red tailed hawks, but would they still have juvenile plumage this late in the year?
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Nov 13, 2014 20:05
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ExecuDork posted:Where are you? Location is a big part of narrowing in on a bird ID. Whoops, I forgot about that part. I live in Salem, Oregon.
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Nov 14, 2014 19:04
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Hello bird thread! I'm pretty sure I found some owl pellets in by backyard yesterday I think owls are totally awesome animals, and I've never seen one in the wild that I can recall. Is there a good chance I might see it if I watch for it, or are they unlikely to visit the same areas in the short term?
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Jul 6, 2015 18:08
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Thanks for all the info. I found it right under a good sized dogwood, so there's definitely a good perch nearby, but not an especially dense one. I'll see if there's any concentration of bird poop around there and watch for owls in the evening. There's a couple bedroom windows nearby I could watch from, so I'll try to be stealthy and see what happens.
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Jul 6, 2015 22:28
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I've got a Nikon Monarch and have been pretty satisfied with it. Granted I mostly use it for astronomy and spying on the neighbors, but I guess you could use it to look at birds. I guess.Cythereal posted:Where are they from, anyway? I'd never heard of frogmouths before seeing that post, but they look very similar to the whipoorwills we have here in the eastern US. Australia, naturally. They are literally Muppets. 
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Jul 9, 2015 03:51
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I'm having trouble identifying a bird I saw in my yard just now. I thought it was a sparrow at first, but it had yellow markings on its front which I don't remember seeing before. Its beak wasn't sparrow-like either, more like a nuthatch or a warbler. It was perched on my suet feeder and had its back to me for the most part, which was a grayish-brown with lighter edges on the wing feathers. It would look around every few seconds though, and the chin and breast were yellow, but with a much lighter band separating them. Any idea what it might have been? I live in Western Oregon.
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Jan 27, 2016 01:01
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 13:18 |
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BetterLekNextTime posted:Possibly a Yellow-rumped Warbler? I've got one that has claimed my suet cake and will chase away anything smaller than a woodpecker. They are really variable in appearance but also quite common in the winter in a lot of places. Look for a yellow rump patch when it flies. Definitely possible. I feel like I would have noticed that patch since it was facing away from me, but there are plenty of pictures where it's almost entirely obscured by the wings. It never turned all the way around either, so it's possible that it just had yellow patches on the side rather than all the way across like I assumed. I'll keep watching, they're pretty common around here apparently, and that suet cake is pretty popular.
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Jan 27, 2016 01:41
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