{"id":157896,"date":"2024-04-27T06:09:31","date_gmt":"2024-04-27T12:09:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=157896"},"modified":"2024-04-27T12:49:59","modified_gmt":"2024-04-27T18:49:59","slug":"theres-some-kind-of-magic-going-on-at-my-feeders-this-spring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/27\/theres-some-kind-of-magic-going-on-at-my-feeders-this-spring\/","title":{"rendered":"There’s Some Kind Of Magic Going On At My Feeders This Spring"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m seeing more birds, and a greater variety of bird species, than I’ve ever seen in my yard before.<\/p>\n

Typically I don’t get a lot of bird variety at my back yard bird feeders. House Sparrows, House Finches and European Starlings predominate, with a splattering of other species on occasion. I live close to the Jordan River, so it’s always been my theory that many birds prefer the riparian habitat of the river over my fairly typical suburban yard.<\/p>\n

In springtime I usually get a few more birds and more species variety but nothing like I’m getting this year. For the last ten days or so, my back yard has been popping with birds, more birds and more species than I’ve ever seen in my yard before.<\/p>\n

So far there have been several minor surprises and two major surprises.<\/p>\n

All photos below were taken through windows so they’re lacking in quality. Some are worse than others, for reasons I’ll explain.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Readers already know about the lifer pair of migrating Evening Grosbeaks I found at my feaders three days ago. Well, they’re still here. This photo of the male was taken yesterday and I saw both the male and the female several times the day before too.<\/p>\n

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And yesterday I was blown away when I realized that there were two<\/em><\/span> males in my yard, in addition to the female. This is the second male. I distinguish him from the original male by the extra spot of yellow behind his yellow supercilium over his eye.<\/p>\n

This photo and the following photo are distorted and blurry because the grosbeaks were on my deck railing, which meant I had to photograph them at a side angle through the glass of my patio door. That old glass has seen better days, which resulted in distorted photos. But they’re good enough to document the presence of the grosbeaks.<\/p>\n

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This photo is even worse but it shows the female and one of the males together on my railing yesterday.<\/p>\n

A little later in the day yesterday I was in for another huge surprise. I’d been grocery shopping, so I walked into my kitchen with both hands carrying bags of groceries and before I even put them on the counter I looked out my kitchen window to see what birds might be at my feeders.<\/p>\n

I immediately saw a splash of unexpected blue. Lazuli blue.<\/p>\n

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There was a male Lazuli Bunting chowing down at my sunflower seed feeder. He isn’t quite in full breeding plumage but he’s close. I’ve lived in my house for over 30 years and I don’t remember ever seeing a Lazuli Bunting in my yard, or even in my neighborhood. Yes, my little heart was going pitter-pat.<\/p>\n

I pay big bucks for high quality bird seed that I purchase from my friend Kelli Frame at her Wild Birds Unlimited<\/a><\/span><\/span> store. Maybe quality seed has made a difference. Whatever the reason, I intend to continue buying primo seed from Kelli.<\/p>\n

If I have to mortgage my house to do it, so be it. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Note: My old friend? Bandito<\/a><\/span><\/span> is one of the reasons I go through so much expensive bird seed. He finally learned to outfox (outsquirrel?) the Slinky I’ve installed on my feeder pole, so he’s been getting much more than his fair share of seed.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Edit, 8:20 AM: I just now looked out my window and this is the scene that greeted me. You see part of my (now ineffective) Slinky at lower right.<\/em><\/p>\n

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I’m seeing more birds, and a greater variety of bird species, than I’ve ever seen in my yard before. (4 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":157898,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,334,7430,392,569],"tags":[7433,7067,571,311,7434],"class_list":["post-157896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-evening-grosbeaks","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-lazuli-buntings","tag-evening-grosbeak","tag-kelli-frame","tag-lazuli-bunting","tag-utah-2","tag-wiild-birds-unlimited"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/evening-grosbeak-2700-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-F4I","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157896"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":157958,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157896\/revisions\/157958"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}