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My wife and I have recently been enjoying visits from a barred owl. We often see it in the woods behind our house around breakfast time. It may be hunting mice around our compost bin. I got these photos from about 10 m with an extended zoom Nikon 995.
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What a great picture. Thanks for sharing.
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Such beautiful photography, thank you for posting. I am jealous, I rarely see owls.
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Great picture. I rarely see Owls except Snowy ones on telephone poles
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My main birdwatching goal, for now, is to see an owl. I only started birdwatching last week. Those are beautiful pictures and they inspire me.
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It's so beautiful!
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That picture is amazing! I love owls but I rarely see them in my neighborhood.
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Incredibly beautiful photos!
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What a gorgeous picture!
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Awesome pictures and what a great expression on the owl's face in the second one. I also love how you can see the different feather shapes and textures.
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Topic 1. I have a Barn Owl print by Mort Solberg and was curious to learn about the Barn Owl and its song. I also like to see the Blue Heron when I go to the zoo so I was curious to hear the song of the Blue Heron. Topic 3. I have a hummingbird feeder in my backyard. One hummingbird in particular is I think the Allen's hummingbird. It is my favorite! It has an iridescent coat with a pink throat. The body is green in color and is slender compared with the Anna's hummingbird. It brings me such happiness to see all of the different hummingbirds feed from the feeder! It is such a blessing!
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I really enjoyed the first lesson. It was an unseasonably cold day and very windy so there were no birds around all afternoon. However, just now (7pm ) I just saw a bald eagle flying alongside a gull. It was hard to know which was chasing which but fun to see!
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Birds bring me into the moment, forget about covid 19 and help me feel connected to nature. I always enjoy the song of the house finch, meadowlark and catching a glimpse of a goldfinch. Swimming birds are very challenging for me but love seeing wood ducks. The avocet is probably my favorite wading bird- very elegant. Barn owls have faces like cats and I hear them outside my window at night. I had my first spring visit by a hummingbird today!
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I think birding does that for us all.
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We saw a juvenile bald eagle in our yard. He flew in large circles, and then swooped down and caught a large fish from the river. He took a few seconds to secure it, and then flew away. We could hear the flapping of his strong wings. Magnificent (but of course no camera near by!) My favorite birds are the small little birds that brighten my day ... white breasted nuthatches and goldfinches. There are many birds on our property, and I am looking forward to identifying them! Excited about this course.
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Wow! What a treat to experience!
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Laura, where are you located? What a cool experience. We have a few eagles here in Charleston, SC, but I have never seen them other than flying. Usually an experienced birder friend points them out to me! 😀
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Even though it’s one of the most commonly seen birds in my neighborhood, I never get tired of seeing a Northern Cardinal.
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I agree with you! My Mom gave me this. I have a pair of cardinals (angels) that visit my feeder every day.
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@cindy I am lucky to get quite a few cardinals to my feeder. There's one silly female that climbs right in, she's really too big to do it comfortably. She looks all squished up, and she seems to be the only one that does it. But we are lucky to have so many in the woods behind our yard.
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@cindy My dad always said the female cardinal reminded him of my mom. Mom wore the same color lipstick.
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One can hear them in my neighborhood calling one another quite often. It would seem as if one is on one side of my building and the other on the opposite side. They are sometimes shy and hard to spot, but you can always hear them.
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Northern Cardinal hanging around my back yard.
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- I took a hike today at a local nature center. I think I identified a prothonotary warbler near a bird blind and some swallows flying around a lake. I am working on identifying the type of swallows.
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These Little guys on my front porch! Robins I think!
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Cute!
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We get robins that nest in my fern every year and I never get tired of watching the hatchlings grow up. But they can be noisy!
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- The Golden Crowned Kinglet is my favourite bird in the spring. It is such a small and fast bird to catch in the moment. On this male you can see a touch of yellow on his head about the eye and his red swatch further back on his head.
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Nice photo. Where is this?
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Beautiful photo!
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So cute. I love the little fluffy birds, like the Chickadee and Nuthatch.
- The Golden Crowned Kinglet is my favourite bird in the spring. It is such a small and fast bird to catch in the moment. On this male you can see a touch of yellow on his head about the eye and his red swatch further back on his head.
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- The red tailed hawk is a favorite of mine as he surveys his world from atop a high electrical tower or soars gracefully above the spring grasses growing underneath the towers. One day he surprised me as he looked at me from the tall grass beside the walking path. I was able to get a photo of him with my iPhone.
- The red tailed hawk is a favorite of mine as he surveys his world from atop a high electrical tower or soars gracefully above the spring grasses growing underneath the towers. One day he surprised me as he looked at me from the tall grass beside the walking path. I was able to get a photo of him with my iPhone.
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I was on Maui this past winter (back in the good old days when we were allowed to fly in airplanes and travel the world, before the current pandemic isolated us at home in Michigan). My favorite bird on Maui is the Cattle Egret. Egrets are "wading birds" but I always saw them in the bushes or grass along the ocean shoreline.
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My favorite bird in my neighborhood is the Northern Mockingbird. There are several that come to my porch every day and I love to hear them sing on my chimney. My sister's favorite bird is the Great Blue Heron. They fly over our house almost every day and they look really graceful and elegant.
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I, too, want to mention the mockingbird as my favorite—probably the most common bird around my house, in Southern California. I woke up at about 1:30 this morning and heard a mockingbird singing loudly—a lone voice in the middle of the night.
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We live on a lake and my favorite bird to watch right outside of our house is the Ruddy Ducks. It is a waterfowl. What I think is great about them is how vibrant blue the male's bills are. It's really cool to see that color blue in contrast to their redish/brown body. There are also a pair of Mute swans that live on the lake that are great to look at. The white of their bodies is brilliant and it is interesting to watch such a pretty bird be territorial towards other birds in their bay.
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1. The Lilac-breasted Roller is absolutely beautiful--it blends into the sky's colors! Saw one in Africa this fall. 2. The American Goldfinch, Red Bellied Woodpecker and Tufted Titmouse come to my feeder almost everday and bring so much joy. 3.When the Osprey come back in March, you know spring has arrived and summer is not far off. They can't be missed in the sky with their white head and dark wide wing span. They dive down to catch fish and are successful more than 50% of the time. They carry the fish off in their talons. Remarkable!
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Yes! There is an Osprey pair nesting in my neighborhood with three chicks about to fledge. It is so cool to see them fish for the family! My friend took some great pics this week, maybe she will share some.
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We have enjoyed seeing an Eastern Towhee spend some time in our yard. So he/she would be part of the sparrows. There is a Barred Owl in the park near our house- so he is a raptor. About a week ago we saw a pileated woodpecker which was a first for us and obviously part of the woodpecker group.
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The Pilates Wood Pecker, I have seen them in the woods in Pennsylvania but I didn't realize just how large they are until I spooked one from the back side of an old log I was hiking past on the Appalachian Trail. It really startled me.
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@Bruce Awesome picture of the Pileated woodpecker. It does look huge! It must have been amazing to almost stumble into one. I've seen a few of these in Maryland in the woods and recently just outside my apartment. But I have never been so close to one!
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Gila Woodpecker visits my agave bloom multiple times a day. He noisily announces his presence. Phoenix, AZ
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Excellent shot — thx for sharing it.
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That’s a great shot of your woodpecker. The ones around my house are mostly interested in stealing from the hummingbird feeders.
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Excellent photo! Thanks for sharing.
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NYC, Central Park.
Red winged Black Bird. Crow family?
NYC, Central Park.
One of about a million Red Robin's sharing their Springtime joy in the Park. You cant miss them, they're all over the place.
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We have many red-winged Blackbirds. Noisy and fiesty. I had to look it up; they are in the Icteridae family.
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Activity 2 Sandhill Cranes and Whooping Crane in Alabama -- Family: Gruidae
Pair of House Finches in Alabama -- Family: Fringillidae
Cedar Waxwing in Alabama -- Family: Bombycillidae
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Great photos! I love the Cedar Waxwing and I have only ever seen it at Magee's Marsh on Lake Erie. Hopefully, I will see it again soon.
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Glaucus-winged gull made an appearance on my deck while I watched song birds at the feeders. Couldn't figure out what he was after - bird seed? suet? He was quite silly and stumbled over his webbed feet as he walked along the rail :)
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While looking at this incredible course, and discovering the wall of birds, I have my bird feeder right outside the window, and I'm watching Northern Cardinals, Brown Headed Cowbirds, and White Throated Sparrows fly in and out, plucking up the seed. Thank you so much for organizing this course! I look forward to the other lessons ahead! Does anyone have any field guides that they recommend. I got the Merlin app this morning. For activity 3, my personal favorite bird that I see around my house is the red bellied wood pecker. I love the black and white patterns on the back of their wings! They occasionally stop by at my homemade bird feeder! Thank you!
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I use the Sibley Guide particular to my region. It's very helpful and the illustrations are fantastic.
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@Wren My birding satisfaction increased immensely when I did two things. I purchased a camera capable of getting close up shots. This has allowed me to study a bird which I could not see for long in the wild. The second is the downloading of the Merlin Bird app. This is an incredibly power tool for identifying birds. It has rarely failed me.
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I live in Duluth MN and the past couple weeks we had a small hawk like bird calling almost the enterer day. He must have been successful because they are now nesting in a large spruce tree on our block. I was watching it with my neighbor who happens to volunteers at the famous Hawk ridge raptor area. I asked him if it was a type of Kestrel which I grew up seeing a lot of them in Wisconsin, but it just did not look the same. I was told me it was a Merlin. I will keep an eye on it into the summer
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As I am taking this course I'm observing the Common Flicker, Yellow shaft. So interesting to find them moving into my yard. Last year I only had one, this year, a group. Learning to distinguish the male and female, took awhile, but I get it. A male is starting to carve out a hole, in a pine tree. Hope he makes it his home. The newest bird that has been seen, only once, was the Brown Creeper. And it really dose creep. It's feathers are camouflaged to blend into trees. The Eagles are moving in, off of Onondaga Lake, so the bird mix is beginning to change. I don't see the Peregrine Falcon as much. PS: Glad I didn't destroy a rotted tree stump, apparently, it has tons of ants in it! Thank you, Helen
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Activity 3: I love watching the nuthatches around my house. The most common one I see is the red-breasted nuthatch, with a handsome red breast, slate-blue back, and white and black eye stripes. They way that they move around, "hop-clinging" both up and down tree trunks, is so unique.
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Northern Cardinal is my favourite. It sits in tree in front of my bedroom window and keeps me in tune all day! It adds a bit of brightness to the world even in these tough times
Even though it’s one of the most commonly seen birds in my neighborhood, I never get tired of seeing a Northern Cardinal. 
I agree with you! My Mom gave me this. I have a pair of cardinals (angels) that visit my feeder every day. 
I was on Maui this past winter (back in the good old days when we were allowed to fly in airplanes and travel the world, before the current pandemic isolated us at home in Michigan). My favorite bird on Maui is the Cattle Egret. Egrets are "wading birds" but I always saw them in the bushes or grass along the ocean shoreline. 
Gila Woodpecker visits my agave bloom multiple times a day. He noisily announces his presence. Phoenix, AZ 
NYC, Central Park.
Red winged Black Bird. Crow family?
NYC, Central Park.
One of about a million Red Robin's sharing their Springtime joy in the Park. You cant miss them, they're all over the place. 
Pair of House Finches in Alabama -- Family: Fringillidae
Cedar Waxwing in Alabama -- Family: Bombycillidae
Glaucus-winged gull made an appearance on my deck while I watched song birds at the feeders. Couldn't figure out what he was after - bird seed? suet? He was quite silly and stumbled over his webbed feet as he walked along the rail :) Read More: