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.