Birds

This is our male hummingbird. He ferociously defends his feeder against all…except this time of year when he welcomes females to sip nectar. Then he will sit nearby bobbing his head and making some chirps (or at least that is what the high-frequency-hearing-enabled people tell me)

A relatively-rare visitor to the Sunnyvale garden is the red-tailed hawk. The red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) is a bird of prey. In my garden, it tries to feed on doves and finches. One moment, your seed-feeder has attracted a lot of birds. Suddenly they all take off. Next moment is the swoosh of the hawk.

Mourning Doves are a wonderful visitor to your garden. The males sing the distinctive song. The doves tend to mate for life. I have seen the young doves fed from the crops of the parents. The doves are very sloppy nest builders: A few sticks; a few inches; eh, fine enough.

My garden has over a dozen species of visiting birds. Anna’s hummingbirds – If you add a hummingbird-feeder, you will have them year-round Lesser Gold-finches – they like the small niger seed House Finches (aka Rose finches) – they like the small niger seed plus larger seeds up to sunflower size Oregon juncos Chestnut-backed Chickadees Bewick Wren Scrub Blue Jays …

tbd

As plain as a bird can be, marked only by a short crest, the Oak Titmouse (Baeolophus inornatus) nonetheless has personality. Pairs or family parties travel about the woods together, exploring the twigs for insects and calling to each other frequently. Before Sunnyvale was Sunnyvale, the community was known as Encinal, the spanish word for Coast Live Oak. There are …

California’s oak woodlands are the place to look for Nuttall’s Woodpeckers. If you find an oak tree in California, even in suburban areas, there’s a chance that a Nuttall’s Woodpecker will be around. These small woodpeckers don’t just forage on trunks and branches, they also forage on tiny stems in willows and alders where they might look more like a …

In our Sunnyvale garden, there is always one, and only one, dominant male hummingbird. He tries to keep every other hummingbird away from the feeder with one exception: During breeding season, the male allows some females to feed. tbd