Elusive Birds of Fairview

Since Sean has arrived for a visit we have kept pretty busy with work in our front yard, but today we decided to have some fun and go birding. We picked the Fairview Wetlands in South Salem, a favorite of ours for a number of years.  With the seasonal change the wetlands have dried up a lot and lush growth made it difficult to find many of the birds we knew were there. 

 nceng for Illusive Birds

Sean used an iPod to attract some Virginia Rails

One of the elusive Virginia Rails

White-crowned Sparrows could be heard singing, but were difficult to find, like this one hiding in a maple tree.

We discovered this Song Sparrow had a reason to be so elusive, it was feeding young ones.

We almost overlooked this juvenile American Kestrel because he sat so still he looked like part of the snag.

Learning More About Wrens

Yesterday morning John West and I went birding on the Rich Guadagno Trail at Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge.  One of the highlights was finding a couple of noisy little House Wrens, one of which is shown above. You can see its bill is partially open and its throat swelled out as it tweets out a song. It is amazing to me what I continue to learn about birds. For some reason that I can’t explain both Jeanette and I have just assumed the House Wrens are a pretty common bird. I’m not sure where that notion came from, perhaps some childhood book on birds, but it is not true.  This one I photographed yesterday was the first for me for Polk County, and looking back at my eBird records I have only seen a House Wren five times in the last two years in Oregon. The other wrens that we see locally; Pacific Wren, Bewick’s Wren, and Marsh Wren are year around residents and we see quite often, but the House Wren is only a summer resident, migrating here to breed and nest from April through September.

Hovering Kingfisher

We took Sean to the coast today and met up with friends John & Lorraine to show them Beaver Creek Marsh State Natural Area where we volunteer at the Welcome Center.  We volunteered there last July and August and will be volunteering there again this September. After a picnic lunch we also gave them a tour of Ona Beach where Beaver Creek flows into the ocean.  The most amazing bird sighting was this Belted Kingfisher hovering over Beaver Creek in search of a fish or something.  I have seen several species of birds do this kind of hunting, notably American Kestrels, and Northern Harriers, but this is the first time I can recall seeing a Belted Kingfisher behave this way.  We watched it for some time, and I picked up a photo tip from John and used the sports setting on my camera that allowed me to take a burst of frames at a time.  I ended up with 40 photos in a very short period of time.  Notice in the middle photo the bird appears to be taking a glance at me all the while hovering in place. 

Backyard Birds

I was delighted to have this pair of House Finches show up at my backyard feeder this morning. I had every intention of taking a morning bird walk through Salemtowne and check out the pond on the ninth hole of the golf course.  But as I was in the kitchen getting my morning coffee, a Cooper’s Hawk making a quick stop on our backyard fence caught my attention. As I gathered up my binoculars and camera I began to notice more bird activity, the normal House Sparrows were at the feeder, an Anna’s Hummingbird stopped for a sip of juice, some Goldfinches appeared at the thistle seed feeder. Hmmm, maybe I should make up a bird list while I eat my breakfast. A Scrub Jay flew in, a juvenile Spotted Towhee worked the ground, a Mourning Dove glided in to look for left overs. Before I knew it I had thirteen birds tallied. And I couldn’t resist taking this lower photo a Song Sparrow in the hydrangea flowers.

   

Video Test

My sister-in-law Patty Blair gave me the idea of trying a video so that she could hear the sounds on some of the birds I photograph.  So here is my first crude attempt of a Black-headed Grosbeak from this morning at Minto-Brown Island Park. Going to have to get a little steadier looks like.

A Special Sparrow

This Song Sparrow that I photographed this morning is special to me because it is the first Song Sparrow I have observed at the Salem Audubon Nature Reserve in West Salem.  I started volunteering at the Reserve in December and have reported to eBird.org, 41 checklists, with 35 different species of birds. Until this morning there were only two species that others have reported that I had not seen; a Varied Thrush and a Song Sparrow. The Varied Thrush is a winter visitor to the Valley and was reported in March, and although reported by a very competent birder, I myself have only been tempted to make such an identification by the squeaking car brakes coming down Eola Drive. A Song Sparrow on the other hand, is a very common year around resident, but somehow I had failed to see one until this morning.  It was one of the first few birds I heard when I arrived at the parking lot and I was able to find it and even photograph it as it sang.    

A Wood Duck Day

I went birding at Minto-Brown Island Park today.  It’s a huge Salem city park of almost nine hundred acres, so you have to kind of pick an area to cover.  In this case I parked at parking lot number four and made a big loop around a large slough. Wood Ducks were the item of the day; all told with four different groups I counted seventeen.  This mother was the first one I spotted trying to round up her five fleeing ducklings. The second group I spotted involved a mother having a show down on a log with a turtle. The third group was a rather unusual scene, a mother with five large juveniles being accompanied by a male Mallard. Male Wood Ducks do not hang around to help raise the young, but male Mallards often do, so my take on the situation was that the male Mallard had kind of adopted the Wood Duck family. The forth group was made up on two females and one male, the only male Wood Duck of the day. On the way back to the car I noticed the mother had her family all back together.