We recently got a bird feeder with an attached camera (wifi-connected). I had always dabbled in bird watching, but this surprisingly took me to another level. I now feel protective of my local birds as if they were a pet like a dog. And I recognize them day after day.
My favorite bird before was the cardinal because of its amazing color and song.
Now, with the camera, I have realized the incredible intelligence and personality of woodpeckers. They are my new favorite.
The Cornell BirdLab app is another essential tool for appreciating how much life is around (at least in my region). It feels like a cheat code and has also helped me fall in love with a visually mild bird, the Brown Cowbird.
Another fun bird fact about bluejays and crows: listening for a bunch of screaming crows and/or jays is a good way of finding owls, as they both seem to have an inherent hatred of owls, and harass them whenever given a chance. In my area, the poor owls rarely seem to get any rest from being swooped and yelled at all day.
I haven't seen this with owls but we've got some kind small predator bird like a peregrine falcon that the blue jays have it absolutely out for. The most interesting thing is once they start making the alerting calls, an inter-species mob will form with other birds of similar sized that aren't usually aggressive (like northern flickers) and they'll all harass the falcon until it flies off.
> If their [swallows'] designer had any regard for the effect their flight would have on human beings, then they exist to bring out the bit of that child that is still left in us.
Besides the flight, I like how they are monogamous, some build mud nests, and if they migrate they'd often come back to the same nest. One family of swallows have built their nest by my aging parent's balcony, and have been visiting them for a few years every summer. It brings them tremendous joy watching them and seeing them care for the chicks.
Apropos of colorful descriptions of birds, it's hard not to mention The Peregrine by J. A. Baker. Someone recommended the book to me and I really enjoyed it.
> We are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away.
[...]
> A swallow flits past, purple against the roaring whiteness of the weir, blue over the green smoothness of the river. As so often on spring evenings, no birds sing near me, while all the distant trees and bushes ring with song. Like all human beings, I seem to walk within a hoop of red-hot iron, a hundred yards across, that sears away all life. When I stand still, it cools, and slowly disappears.
To me, blue jays are the natural counterpart of the cardinal. They are like two different varieties of chromatic dragon.
I love the sound and color of red-winged blackbirds flashing among the cattails. But stay away from their nests at breeding time, they will dive-bomb you without hesitation.
There is a lone pied-billed grebe that visits our pond every fall. It looks like a miniature duck that is overloaded with cargo, making it sit too low in the water. Then it will suddenly disappear like a submersible if it spots you approaching.
This time of year, sandhill cranes start passing over our house by companies and batallions, heading northward and filling the air with strange warbling cries. I always wonder why they return so early, as if they are in a rush to get back home to Canada despite the chill that remains in the air even here, hundreds of miles to the south.
Red winged blackbirds are another all time favorite of mine. It is so startling when you see their wing colors flare, and hear their strange polyphonic song. I wish I got to see them more.
In the UK, the one bird I love overall for its song is the blackbird. Best bit of the dawn chorus and the first one of the year lets me know Spring/Summer is on the way.
I think everyone in the UK thinks fondly of robins, and has negative opinions of pigeons. I did too, until I found out that they are Rock Doves that swapped nesting in cliffs by the sea for tall buildings in towns. It's not their fault they're successful at it.
Male pheasants are handsome creatures too, but the most stupidly suicidal birds I have ever seen near to roads.
A murmuation of starlings is hard to beat as well.
Not just that: “City pigeons” are feral descendants of formerly domesticated rock doves. That’s why they are so comfortable around humans, in the way that usually only livestock or pet animals are, and actively seek us and our settlements out.
We just got tired of them, and then largely forgot about all of that.
Upvote for the mockingbird. One fellow has for years perched himself in tree near the sidewalk tables at my favorite restaurant. His songs are as good as the food.
> only three species of birds survived the Chicxulub asteroid impact
I think it was three clades that survived, not individual species.
Yes, it's possible that some of the diversification within those clades happened before the impact, but the start of the radiation is so close to the impact that I think it's unlikely that it happened earlier. It would be too much of a coincidence, and the error bars for the molecular clocks almost always include the impact.
I've got a mockingbird that comes and asks for food every morning. The cardinals and titmice will fly up to the tree outside the window and wait as soon as I open the window, but the mockingbird will sit on the tray on the window and stare at me until I open it. When I do, he'll wait in the tree, but as soon as I put the meal worms down, he'll come back and start chowing down. Doesn't seem to mind being within an arms reach of me at the open window. Never makes a sound though. Not while I can see him around the feeder at least.
Working from home with the window/feeder right next to my desk is pretty nice. You get to see the different temperaments and "personalities" of the various birds pretty quick. Sometimes even within the same species; e.g., most of the male cardinals are a bit aggressive, and chase other smaller birds away if they get too close, but a new young male that started coming recently is considerably more timid, and gets pushed around by most of the other sparrows and wrens.
The red-bellied woodpecker that likes to make machine-gun noises on my gutters every day, however, does get a little tiresome.
When I lived in the PNW I got to know my birds really well. The chickadees were some of my favorite to watch, so dexterous and playful at the feeders.
He's very right about the (hilarious) aggressiveness of hummingbirds, but I did notice the different species acted very different. Not sure the names but the shiny green ones are far more tolerant of each other (I have a picture of 8 sitting on the same feeder at once). The lighter ones with black/yellow/grey markings are SO mean though! Constantly divebombing and harassing. I did have one other (much more rare) type that was orange, that had the most unique personality. Very sweet and brave, but very much a joker. The way he would taunt and "guard" the feeder seemed more like an invitation to play.
For more oddly adorable hummingbirds, I highly recommend this video of a swarm of them having a bit of a party in the water fountain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeKu6NEf02g
Incredible little feathered narwhal bees. And there are so many different kinds of hummingbirds; several hundred I think.
I figured this was going to be about Parrots and I got excited, because I have 3 of them and they're great when they're not being annoying...adorably.
Then I see these aren't parrots, and that's cool too, because birds - Parrots, Cardinals, Chickens, Emus...are freekin' awesome. There is clearly something going on in their comparatively smaller brains.
It's leftover from when all mammals were nocturnal. Color vision is useless at night, there aren't enough photons to care about their frequency, so mammals lost it almost entirely and only primates have re-evolved the red-green distinction. Birds were big stomping dinosaurs, and out during the day, so their color vision is great.
Some mammals can see UV even though they can't differentiate it from other blues. One theory I recall reading is that detecting UV would interfere with our unusually high visual acuity, but I forget the argument why.
Yep we would have had it.
Then traded the fourth type of cone for more rods because we were hiding underground and only coming out at night ... to be fair those dinos were big.
I love this, love the writing, and share the joy of watching hummingbirds and swallows, but....
Hard disagree on the mockingbirds. Fuck those guys. A long time ago, I had one singing less than a block away all night, every night, for the whole summer. Loud enough to be heard with the windows closed. I either didn't try earplugs (this was a long time ago), or maybe they just didn't work for me. It woke me up and kept me awake for long periods due to the unpredictability of its song. By the end of the season I was seriously considering getting a bb or pellet gun and shooting the thing. Not to kill it, just to get it to shut the hell up. I still can't hear one today without getting vague twinges of anger over all the lost sleep.
Huh. Here they only sing in the morning. Are you sure it was a mockingbird? I've heard people have that reaction to whippoorwills and other nightjars that sing loudly and repetitively all night.
They will sing at night if they're "frustrated" and haven't found a mate. I've seen song sparrows do this as well, but it was near a well lit area, so that may had some influence.
When I first moved to the city, I had a mockingbird in a small copse of trees right outside my bedroom window, open to the summer heat. He imitated car alarms all night.
I envisioned him as a punk rock kid who liked to replay our human obnoxiousness back at us to see how we liked it.
We recently got a bird feeder with an attached camera (wifi-connected). I had always dabbled in bird watching, but this surprisingly took me to another level. I now feel protective of my local birds as if they were a pet like a dog. And I recognize them day after day.
My favorite bird before was the cardinal because of its amazing color and song.
Now, with the camera, I have realized the incredible intelligence and personality of woodpeckers. They are my new favorite.
The Cornell BirdLab app is another essential tool for appreciating how much life is around (at least in my region). It feels like a cheat code and has also helped me fall in love with a visually mild bird, the Brown Cowbird.
If you haven't done it yet, read about how the brown-headed cowbird "raises" its young!
Just did, mind blown. I didn't know "parasitic brooding" was a thing in any animals, but totally makes sense.
As always, the HN collective helps my brainspace and experience of the world grow a bit.
Edit: I’ll pay it forward with another one: my favorite fact about bluejays is their evolved mimicry of hawks’ screams, to scare away other birds.
Another fun bird fact about bluejays and crows: listening for a bunch of screaming crows and/or jays is a good way of finding owls, as they both seem to have an inherent hatred of owls, and harass them whenever given a chance. In my area, the poor owls rarely seem to get any rest from being swooped and yelled at all day.
We have a big ponderosa pine on our property and sometimes the stellar jays go wild when there is a bird of prey up there.
We have seen barred owls, great horned owls, and cooper’s hawks.
https://imgur.com/a/ymDn7ff
I haven't seen this with owls but we've got some kind small predator bird like a peregrine falcon that the blue jays have it absolutely out for. The most interesting thing is once they start making the alerting calls, an inter-species mob will form with other birds of similar sized that aren't usually aggressive (like northern flickers) and they'll all harass the falcon until it flies off.
It's called mobbing!
In my area the yelling is always about hawks. The owls here are nocturnal so they don’t overlap.
I've been putting out seed in winter but seeing a Cooper Hawk show up occasionally, I feel a little bad.
> If their [swallows'] designer had any regard for the effect their flight would have on human beings, then they exist to bring out the bit of that child that is still left in us.
Besides the flight, I like how they are monogamous, some build mud nests, and if they migrate they'd often come back to the same nest. One family of swallows have built their nest by my aging parent's balcony, and have been visiting them for a few years every summer. It brings them tremendous joy watching them and seeing them care for the chicks.
Apropos of colorful descriptions of birds, it's hard not to mention The Peregrine by J. A. Baker. Someone recommended the book to me and I really enjoyed it.
> We are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away.
[...]
> A swallow flits past, purple against the roaring whiteness of the weir, blue over the green smoothness of the river. As so often on spring evenings, no birds sing near me, while all the distant trees and bushes ring with song. Like all human beings, I seem to walk within a hoop of red-hot iron, a hundred yards across, that sears away all life. When I stand still, it cools, and slowly disappears.
To me, blue jays are the natural counterpart of the cardinal. They are like two different varieties of chromatic dragon.
I love the sound and color of red-winged blackbirds flashing among the cattails. But stay away from their nests at breeding time, they will dive-bomb you without hesitation.
There is a lone pied-billed grebe that visits our pond every fall. It looks like a miniature duck that is overloaded with cargo, making it sit too low in the water. Then it will suddenly disappear like a submersible if it spots you approaching.
This time of year, sandhill cranes start passing over our house by companies and batallions, heading northward and filling the air with strange warbling cries. I always wonder why they return so early, as if they are in a rush to get back home to Canada despite the chill that remains in the air even here, hundreds of miles to the south.
I love Charley Harper's depiction of all the colors in a winter bird feeder. https://charleyharperprints.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/W...
Red winged blackbirds are another all time favorite of mine. It is so startling when you see their wing colors flare, and hear their strange polyphonic song. I wish I got to see them more.
Your writing is very reminiscent of Aldo Leopold's in 'A Sand County Almanac' (which is an equal delight to read)
Thanks! It's not my usual writing style, but I read that book years ago and am probably channeling some bits of Leopold today. :-)
I love that book. It's an all time favorite, and an inspiration.
> to get back home to Canada
Many now return to the area near Necedah Wildlife Refuge in Juneau County, WI - adjacent to Leopold's Sand (Sauk) County.
Thanks, I didn't realize that! Not necessarily so far north as I thought then. I assumed they were all going up to the tundra.
In the UK, the one bird I love overall for its song is the blackbird. Best bit of the dawn chorus and the first one of the year lets me know Spring/Summer is on the way.
I think everyone in the UK thinks fondly of robins, and has negative opinions of pigeons. I did too, until I found out that they are Rock Doves that swapped nesting in cliffs by the sea for tall buildings in towns. It's not their fault they're successful at it.
Male pheasants are handsome creatures too, but the most stupidly suicidal birds I have ever seen near to roads.
A murmuation of starlings is hard to beat as well.
Not just that: “City pigeons” are feral descendants of formerly domesticated rock doves. That’s why they are so comfortable around humans, in the way that usually only livestock or pet animals are, and actively seek us and our settlements out.
We just got tired of them, and then largely forgot about all of that.
The fattest, healthiest pigeons I have ever seen are the ones at Borough Market [1] in London. It must be pigeon heaven.
[1] https://boroughmarket.org.uk/
Upvote for the mockingbird. One fellow has for years perched himself in tree near the sidewalk tables at my favorite restaurant. His songs are as good as the food.
> only three species of birds survived the Chicxulub asteroid impact
I think it was three clades that survived, not individual species.
Yes, it's possible that some of the diversification within those clades happened before the impact, but the start of the radiation is so close to the impact that I think it's unlikely that it happened earlier. It would be too much of a coincidence, and the error bars for the molecular clocks almost always include the impact.
I've got a mockingbird that comes and asks for food every morning. The cardinals and titmice will fly up to the tree outside the window and wait as soon as I open the window, but the mockingbird will sit on the tray on the window and stare at me until I open it. When I do, he'll wait in the tree, but as soon as I put the meal worms down, he'll come back and start chowing down. Doesn't seem to mind being within an arms reach of me at the open window. Never makes a sound though. Not while I can see him around the feeder at least.
Working from home with the window/feeder right next to my desk is pretty nice. You get to see the different temperaments and "personalities" of the various birds pretty quick. Sometimes even within the same species; e.g., most of the male cardinals are a bit aggressive, and chase other smaller birds away if they get too close, but a new young male that started coming recently is considerably more timid, and gets pushed around by most of the other sparrows and wrens.
The red-bellied woodpecker that likes to make machine-gun noises on my gutters every day, however, does get a little tiresome.
When I lived in the PNW I got to know my birds really well. The chickadees were some of my favorite to watch, so dexterous and playful at the feeders. He's very right about the (hilarious) aggressiveness of hummingbirds, but I did notice the different species acted very different. Not sure the names but the shiny green ones are far more tolerant of each other (I have a picture of 8 sitting on the same feeder at once). The lighter ones with black/yellow/grey markings are SO mean though! Constantly divebombing and harassing. I did have one other (much more rare) type that was orange, that had the most unique personality. Very sweet and brave, but very much a joker. The way he would taunt and "guard" the feeder seemed more like an invitation to play.
For more oddly adorable hummingbirds, I highly recommend this video of a swarm of them having a bit of a party in the water fountain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeKu6NEf02g
Incredible little feathered narwhal bees. And there are so many different kinds of hummingbirds; several hundred I think.
Gorgeously evocative writing. Thank you for sharing. I'm going to look at birds tomorrow.
I figured this was going to be about Parrots and I got excited, because I have 3 of them and they're great when they're not being annoying...adorably.
Then I see these aren't parrots, and that's cool too, because birds - Parrots, Cardinals, Chickens, Emus...are freekin' awesome. There is clearly something going on in their comparatively smaller brains.
Magpie, just because it’s common doesn’t mean it’s boring. Just watching a common magie come in to land is awesome inspiring.
Hummingbirds just fill me with anxiety. Miserable fate to devolve into an insect.
I'm really basic, I just like seeing the magpies, pied wagtails and little finches on my commute. They make me happy =)
Cedar waxwings are pretty sharp looking too.
Also, somewhat unique in that they don't sing. And they sometimes get drunk by eating fermented berries.
It really makes me wonder why humans never developed the ability to see UV light when so many other creatures in nature can.
It's leftover from when all mammals were nocturnal. Color vision is useless at night, there aren't enough photons to care about their frequency, so mammals lost it almost entirely and only primates have re-evolved the red-green distinction. Birds were big stomping dinosaurs, and out during the day, so their color vision is great.
Some mammals can see UV even though they can't differentiate it from other blues. One theory I recall reading is that detecting UV would interfere with our unusually high visual acuity, but I forget the argument why.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/reindeer-may-not-be-ab... (I don't know if that means reindeer are able to distinguish it from other colors or if they're sensitive to it but ultraviolet-something-colorblind)
Yep we would have had it. Then traded the fourth type of cone for more rods because we were hiding underground and only coming out at night ... to be fair those dinos were big.
Nice list. I also delight in having purple martins nearby. They're such a joy to watch.
In south-east Asia, I loved the Coppersmith Barbet.
I love this, love the writing, and share the joy of watching hummingbirds and swallows, but....
Hard disagree on the mockingbirds. Fuck those guys. A long time ago, I had one singing less than a block away all night, every night, for the whole summer. Loud enough to be heard with the windows closed. I either didn't try earplugs (this was a long time ago), or maybe they just didn't work for me. It woke me up and kept me awake for long periods due to the unpredictability of its song. By the end of the season I was seriously considering getting a bb or pellet gun and shooting the thing. Not to kill it, just to get it to shut the hell up. I still can't hear one today without getting vague twinges of anger over all the lost sleep.
Fuck those guys.
Huh. Here they only sing in the morning. Are you sure it was a mockingbird? I've heard people have that reaction to whippoorwills and other nightjars that sing loudly and repetitively all night.
They will sing at night if they're "frustrated" and haven't found a mate. I've seen song sparrows do this as well, but it was near a well lit area, so that may had some influence.
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/what-can-i-do-about-a-bir...
I honestly figured it was something like that. How else could he afford to spend so much energy all night?
100% positive it was a mockingbird. Huge variety in calls, including a handful that sounded vaguely like sirens and car alarms and such
When I first moved to the city, I had a mockingbird in a small copse of trees right outside my bedroom window, open to the summer heat. He imitated car alarms all night.
I envisioned him as a punk rock kid who liked to replay our human obnoxiousness back at us to see how we liked it.
I had a great deal of appreciation for that bird.
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