re: Birds at your Feeder: 2024

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Rabby

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Man that's an impressive ID list

Bird watching is fun. Y'all must have been doing it for a while to ID all those birds...

Y'all using the old Sibley's book or the Cornell app?

Old photo... but

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Baby bluebirds fledged April 1st...the last kept looking out, then going back down out of sight...he eventually left about an hour after the first 2

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I'm up to three pair of Bluebirds nesting and two pair of tree swallows.

I just had to pull a dead purple martin out of a gourd entrance. I've never had an adult get trapped in one of the plastic gourds I use. It was a male and there was a male trapped in the gourd. I took the side cover off and it flew out after a bit. The one in the entrance hadn't been there long, but the one on the inside had pecked every feather off the top of its head. It looks like the one that got trapped was trying to run the other one out of the gourd in a fight or something. It was in there at an odd angle.

Here’s a Hawk sitting on top of my rose arbor in the front yard. Waiting on a chipmunk to come by.

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Bird watching is fun. Y'all must have been doing it for a while to ID all those birds...

Y'all using the old Sibley's book or the Cornell app?

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The Merlin App (Cornell) is great, as is the Sibley App, and the Audubon App is pretty good as well. eBird (Cornell) is indispensable if you want to keep track of things. Books are going the way of the Dodo but I still pull Sibley off the shelf occasionally. I've recorded over 160 species in my yard. The latest toy is called a Haiku Box - it records bird calls outside your house and lets you know what it's hearing automatically via an app. On a typical day I have 55-70 species recorded. Where I live is mostly undisturbed woods near the ocean so I get a lot of very interesting stuff. Bird and nature photography is another area to dive into.

Red Breasted Swallow




I use Southern Comfort and Coke in my feeder but rum tea and tequila shots seem to work well too.

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The Merlin App (Cornell) is great, as is the Sibley App, and the Audubon App is pretty good as well. eBird (Cornell) is indispensable if you want to keep track of things

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I use the Audubon app because it is smaller (app size) and simpler than Merlin, but the sound ID that Merlin rolled out a while ago looks pretty cool. Identifying by a call that you record would be handy. It is like the Haiku Box, but integrated into Merlin. I've only heard it talked about on podcasts.

Merlin is great for sound ID's, it wasn't always the case but has steadily improved. You can also put a pin on a map and Merlin will give you a list of possible birds and show how likely they are for any given date. Merlin and Haiku Box may use the same data base for analyzing recordings since both are associated with Cornell (LSU Ornithology is very strong as well but Cornell is now the 500 pound Gorilla). Merlin does screw up sometimes. Haiku Box gives a ranking of how sure it is - low, medium, and high probability. I only use high probability and have caught it on a couple that I think it missed on. I do give them feedback when that happens; they use feedback to fine tune the detection software.

I breed them in my garage. I got their DNA from tree sap on my willow tree

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That is an Ivory Bill if I have ever seen one!

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On a typical day I have 55-70 species recorded. Where I live is mostly undisturbed woods near the ocean so I get a lot of very interesting stuff. Bird and nature photography is another area to dive into.

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You live in birding heaven, it seems.

Happy Birding