What is your favorite bird? And every fowl encounter you've had under the sun

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A few final shots of Oregon and I’ll leave you good folks alone for a little while.

Here’s another Black Oystercatcher on Haystack Rock

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This is a Tufted Puffin giving the what-not to a Common Murre. I was very pleased to a get a photo of any kind of this bird. Haystack Rock is famous for them.

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And here’s Haystack Rock. I love how this beach just swallows people up.

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I love puffins!
Every year it makes me laugh when the young hens,the pullets begin laying …there can be some funny little eggs at the start! My hens are Plymouth Rock X bantam so their eggs are not huge,but here’s a pic of one of their normal eggs…and a pullets first attempt at egg laying 🙂
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A new kind of “bird” watching 😒.
These Bird electric scooters are showing abandoned all over my neighborhood now. I guess they’re part of the new internet shared economy, or whatever. People download an app on their smartphone, and then rent the scooter to go wherever. They just leave it when they get to their destination, and someone else with the app gets paid to round them up and bring them in for recharging. They’re controversial here, since people often ride them with little regard for the safety of themselves or the other pedestrians or cars on our streets and sidewalks 😠

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I think it’s a Brant.

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A few more last shots from Oregon.

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Final tally, 127 birds identified in Oregon with 17 Oregon lifers and 2 US lifers. Well beyond my expectations. Woohoo!
 
Thanks. It helps to be in the right place at the right time. I got really fortunate on those.
 
Back home in Arizona. I’ve been out a few times. It sure is different here.

This a southeastern AZ specialty, Grey Hawk welcoming me home. Handsome bird.

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And a young Hepatic Tanager, another local specialty checking me out and learning how to sing.

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A Hermit Thrush. (I thought this photo turned out well.

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And yet another local specialty, the Buff-breasted Flycatcher (I think)

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Battle of the black birds!

These smaller blackbirds (Brewer’s Blackbird?) clearly did not want this larger crow around, competing for food or whatever. They harassed and chased it until it moved on.

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There’s a strange noise out the window tonight like a coarse chirp…it’s very still and a frost tonight and my guess is it’s an owl…but it’s too cold to go and look outside to make sure!
 
Noticing more birds building nests now,magpies and little Ravens .It seems early but a hen is on eggs,and one of the Muscovy ducks also…a sign of a dry Spring to come?
@tad what’s happening with your birds at the moment?
 
Greenfields said:
@tad what’s happening with your birds at the moment?
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Why, thanks for asking. 😃 It’s actually kind of dullsville around here at the moment, most of the summer breeders have moved on, it’s too early for the winter visitors so I’m left with the usual, local residents. Returning from vacation babies occupied both the dove nests and the quail eggs had just begun to hatch. I only managed to see one chick who had the misfortune, when making the leap from the fountain/planter, of landing in one of the broken vessels I like to plant in my garden. It couldn’t make it’s way up the slippery sides and a big lizard was checking it out. I saved it and put it back in it’s nest. It must have made the jump again soon after because I couldn’t find it. Not all the eggs hatched. Curiousity got the best of me and I touched one to see what was happening with the egg underneath it and it exploded! It had a really funky, nasty smell. 😖 Earlier this week I flushed a couple of good sized chicks. I wonder if those were the ones who hatched in my garden.

The other big news is that coming home for lunch one day last month I saw a large cat like critter jump over my wall. At first I thought it was a bobcat, but it had a really long tail. I dismissed it as a big, nasty, grey feral cat with a really long tail. Well, one of my neighbors also saw a critter like that in her backyard and her friends with wildlife experience showed her a picture of a jaguarundi, which she says looked just like her critter. This is what a jaguarundi looks like.

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If that’s what it is, it would be truly amazing. One has never been photographed in Arizona before. But, it was terribly dry last month, and my yard with it’s 6’ wall, constant water supply and a good source of ground squirrels for food, it could happen. I also have only seen one domestic cat in my yard in the 15 years I’ve lived here. The walls are too high to jump for most cats.
 
While it’s a little dull in town, out in the desert we’re experiencing our ‘second spring’. Here’s a couple of local specialties from last year, that take advantage of the monsoon rains.

Varied Bunting.

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And Blue Grosbeak

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That’s a very different wild cat,I hope it is what you think…that’s pretty exciting 😃
As for checking eggs…oh dear,I’ve done that with hens eggs,and screamed when the blasted thing pops! The thing is I often treat the unhatched egg so very gently as there could be a viable chicken inside who can’t get out for what ever reason(that happens so often) and then try to help by tapping the egg gently on a hard surface.Usually there’s a very exhausted chick whose
little shell horn on their beak has come away prematurely,or a malformed chick etc.
When the egg wasn’t fertile or the chick had died sometime back …bang!A stinky surprise 😜
 
After having poultry all my life I’ve noticed there really does seem to be a connection between thunderstorms and the poultry eggs being incubated naturally at that time.My neighbor experiences this at the same too,a clutch of eggs under a hen will all spoil if there’s a thunderstorm at a certain time …when the due date is up each unhatched egg will have in it a partially developed chicken that had died at the time of the thunderstorm .
Someone suggested a hand full of old nuts and bolts under the nest material…but I’m thinking perhaps it’s the change in air pressure or something ,affecting the little air sack in the egg maybe ? 🤔
 
That would be hard.Im glad you live where the seasons might be more subtle than other states?
My daughter an I get headaches when there’s going to be a big thunderstorm,especially when it has been very hot.I’ll text her when one is building ,and yup ,she will have had one gradually getting worse all day too,in the lead up.
I find it all very interesting 🙂
The way birds behave at weather changing,their song changing along with the seasons too.
 
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