If you follow me and read the tags you’ve seen me whining about my failure to ever actually see a Northern Pygmy-Owl. I’d heard them 8 or 9 times over the last few years. Just never seen one.
Alright, this is by far the best image my favorite customer shared with me. He is always providing good laughs—one of the many reasons why he’s my favorite customer.
Male House Finches can come in many different shades of red or even yellow and orange, depending on their diet. Some even take on a vibrant color that might remind of raspberries. And if they do that, they often get confused with another bird that is high on the wishlist of many backyard birdwatchers – the Purple Finch. It is not a mythical creature, it is not the name for House finches with a raspberry hue, and it is around a lot less than House Finches. Once you know their differences, you will be able to more easily know what you got. I had the pleasure of having a Purple Finch visiting yesterday, so I made a little chart that might help learning some of their most obvious markers. The two single photos are both also the Purple. He stayed so long that a little snow accumulated on his head.
Today I went on a walk near a damn I used to visit quite often. It was nice.
Pictured: Northern mocking bird
I don’t know if anyone noticed (or cared to), but I’ve been trying to get back into birdwatching. There are many excuses for why I took a pause, but it’s time I get back to it.
I think that’s probably a Black-headed Gull in the back. The foreground bird is interesting; the dark mantle makes me think it’s likely either Greater or Lesser Black-backed Gull. The leg color looks better for Greater.
Size-wise it’s tough for me to tell; I don’t have a lot of experience with relative sizes of these species. Lesser Black-backed Gull is the only one of them I’ve ever seen in person, and that was a single individual seen on a couple of different occasions at some distance.
Sibley gives the following lengths:
BHGU: 15.7″
LBBG: 21.7″
GBBG: 28.7″
So I guess I have to ask myself, does that foreground bird look like it’s 13 inches longer than the background bird? Or only 6 inches longer? I think I’m leaning toward GBBG, since if its head weren’t tucked in I suspect it would look a lot bigger than the COGU. That plus the leg color isn’t enough for me to feel like it’s a slam-dunk, but I’m at least leaning in the GBBG direction. I wonder if there are any photos that show the foreground bird better. It would be interesting to see the extent of dark streaking on the head and nape.
Anyway, I knew that both of the black-backed species were potentially present in @seeseagulls’ vicinity, but hadn’t seen one show up in their blog before. Cool!
Yeah, I work at one of the other SoCal CSUs and I’m very aware of the weird ass history behind the property for CSUCI! I have known people who were confined there. It’s really funky.
This is me finally putting into practise a specific technique I want to learn to use. The yellow pencil was drawn, scanned in and coloured separately. The rest is just blue pencil and watercolour with some digital changes to tweak colour/value.
