Theresa

The other morning when I was out running I stopped to watch 4 egrets in a pond in my neighborhood.  A couple of them were wading, presumably hunting, and the other two were taking turns hopping up, flying down to the other end of the pond and looping back to where they started.  One would hop up and fly away and the other would follow.  Not sure if they were playing or if it was a territory thing.  One of them did a little vocalizing on one of his loops and let's just say he's not the singer that some of the birds in the Birdsong topic were....more of a croak than a song.   Red-tailed hawks are very common around here and I always get a strange sort of kick out of seeing them get mobbed...the "mobbers" really don't hold back.  The other night I saw a hawk getting mobbed and it even looked like one of the smaller birds (couldn't tell what they were) clipped him.  Must be a real rush for the little guys.  ;)

I've been using Merlin for a while but never utilized the "most likely" feature in Explore Birds.  Tested it out the other night and it is awesome.  I wasn't shocked by the birds at the top of the list--robin, grackle, starling, mourning dove, redwinged blackbird, house sparrow, cardinal--and I think I saw all of them when I went for a walk that evening.  One bird that was just outside the top 10 on the list was brown-headed cowbird, which I've seen in my area but not consistently.  Voila, what do you supposed landed right in my path that very evening, just a few feet away?  :D  Was so tickled to see it.  "Most Likely" will definitely be my default setting in Merlin from now on. It's also interesting that in just a few days, the birds a little further down the list have changed position significantly...according to Merlin, in the next week or so I need to be looking out for bobolinks and meadowlarks in my area, two birds I never would have bothered to look for before.  Just have to find a birding Hot Spot with an open field....      

Activity 1: birds I can ID by their shape.  Mourning doves have a distinctive shape especially when compared to the many finches and sparrows commonly seen in my neighborhood; their long tails and small heads are their most recognizable features.  On the other hand, a robin is much more proportionate; its tail is neither long nor stumpy, and its head looks like the right size for its body. Activity 4: describing a favorite bird using mulitple strategies.  A red-winged blackbird looks like what it's called: solid glossy black overall, with a squarish patch of red on its "shoulder" or the top of its wing.  I always think of it as an epaulet.  :)  It's around the size of a robin.  I see and hear them in areas where different habitats come together, for instance on the edges of a field or meadow that's bordered by trees, or in the tall grass in and around ponds or wetlands.  The males are often out and about while the females stay undercover.  It took me forever to figure out that the small brown birds darting through the high grass around the pond in a favorite local park are not sparrows but female redwinged blackbirds.  Their song is somehow both shrill and guttural, and I've seen it phoneticized in field guides as "kon-ka-REE," but recently I realized it also sounds uncomfortably like "quart-an-TINE," lol.  My favorite thing about their song is when I can hear multiple birds calling and responding to one another, for instance when I'm walking down a long straight path and I can hear them "telegraphing" to one another up and down the path.