{"id":158012,"date":"2024-04-29T06:04:53","date_gmt":"2024-04-29T12:04:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=158012"},"modified":"2024-04-29T10:31:15","modified_gmt":"2024-04-29T16:31:15","slug":"evening-grosbeaks-galore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/29\/evening-grosbeaks-galore\/","title":{"rendered":"Evening Grosbeaks Galore"},"content":{"rendered":"

Plus, the reappearance of an old avian friend that I was absolutely delighted to see again.<\/p>\n

Readers already know that five days ago I had three Evening Grosbeaks, two males and one female, at my backyard feeders. For me Evening Grosbeaks were a lifer species so my excitement was palpable. All three birds hung around together for three days so I had a blast with them.<\/p>\n

As always with these grosbeaks, all my photos of them below were taken through my kitchen windows. They simply won’t tolerate me being outside in my yard with them. We’ve had overcast and rainy weather for days so the light was always low. I was using my older Canon 7D Mark II and my “baby lens” and even at ISO 1600 I never had enough shutter speed to freeze the wings of birds in flight.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Then suddenly, two days ago (this photo was taken yesterday), there were three<\/span> adult males gorging themselves on my mix of hulled sunflower seeds, hulled white millet and roasted peanut pieces, which they really<\/em><\/span> seem to enjoy. I never saw the female again but my bounty of colorful males had increased by 50%.<\/p>\n

And things were about to get even better.<\/p>\n

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Early yesterday morning I suddenly realized that there were five, (count’em, five!), adult males at one of my feeders. You could have knocked me over with… well, a feather. I spent way too much time standing in front of my kitchen window, trying to get all five of them in one shot. I succeeded a few times but it wasn’t easy.<\/p>\n

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Things were pretty raucous at times. European Starlings seemed to take great delight in…<\/p>\n

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displacing the grosbeaks from the feeder and pissing me off in the process. Whenever something like this happened, I typically didn’t see any grosbeaks again for at least a half hour. Sometimes much longer.<\/p>\n

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OK, in my last few blog posts I’ve probably overloaded my readers with photos of Evening Grosbeaks at feeders so let’s move on to something very different.<\/p>\n

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Two days ago I spotted this leucistic<\/a><\/span><\/span> adult male Red-winged Blackbird (along with the two Mourning Doves you see at the bottom of the frame) scrounging fallen seed at the base of my feeder. I was extra excited to see him because he’s an old friend. I spotted him in my yard several times last spring but while he was in my yard I was never able to get photos of him.<\/p>\n

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However, I did photograph him about six weeks ago at a pond that’s only about a quarter mile from my house. With those white primary feathers in his left wing he’s very easy to recognize.<\/p>\n

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When he took off I got a (very soft) photo that better shows the extent of the leucism in his left wing. His outermost primary is black but the rest are as white as the driven snow, except for a proximal portion of one of them. And the distal portion of one of his secondaries is also white. In other photos I could tell that the rest of his body, including his right wing and his tail, is covered with normally colored black feathers.<\/p>\n

All this makes me wonder. How often do we see individual birds that we’ve seen before, even in previous years, but there’s nothing distinctive about them so we don’t recognize them? Who knows, they may recognize us but we don’t recognize them.<\/p>\n

I suspect it might happen more often than we think it does.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Plus, the reappearance of an old avian friend that I was absolutely delighted to see again. (7 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":158015,"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],"tags":[7429,2344,7437,7436,7435,3089,311],"class_list":["post-158012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-evening-grosbeaks","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","tag-coccothraustes-vespertinus","tag-european-starling","tag-individual-birds-returning-to-the-same-place-from-year-to-year","tag-leucistic-male-red-winged-blackbird","tag-male-evening-grosbeaks","tag-salt-lake-county","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/evening-grosbeak-3160-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-F6A","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158012","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=158012"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":158059,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158012\/revisions\/158059"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/158015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}