Some Special Birds

 

 

We like all our animals that come to the porch for meal worms (well, maybe not house sparrows) but some are special. Let's see if I can explain why.

Well, our Roadrunner is an example. First of all, it's a very dramatic bird, one you wouldn't expect to see every day if you didn't have something to draw him in. And, more than that, we have a sort of personal relationship with him. He knows us and is tame around us, or rather, is very greedy around us, but it's more than that: he was tame around us immediately, the first time he saw us, as if someone had already trained him how to act towards humans carrying meal worms. The first time we saw him, he came right up to us, rather than running away. The other creatures we feed first needed to be shown that we weren't going to hurt them.

 

 I'm thinking of two more species that fit this description.

Farther down the yard from our porch we have some big saucers which we keep full of water for the birds to drink. One day Cheryl, who has much better eyes than I do, looked down at the small birds that were foraging around the saucers and said "We've got a Yellow-breasted Chat down there."

I looked with my binoculars and sure enough there was a bird with a yellow breast and eyes with white outlines. Formerly this bird was considered to be a warbler. Warblers are small, brightly-colored, often sweet-singing birds, and this bird is a great clunking bird with an unending song of often harsh noises, or imitations of mechanical sounds. In the latest bird guides I notice they no longer consider it a warbler, but no one has yet decided what it should be instead. But whatever it is, it is fun to see. It has all the bright colors of warblers and it skulks around often in wetlands and is impossible to get a glimpse of, then suddenly gets up on a cattail and does its crazy song in plain sight.

We hadn't expected ever to see one here in the open desert instead of some riparian gulch of heavy vegetation. I was dying to find some way to get close to it so I could try to take some pictures of it. Well the next day it was up close to the house, and then it was on the porch tamely taking meal worms and posing for any pictures I wanted.

Here are some pictures of it wandering around under our feet.

This rather spectacular bird stayed with us for several weeks, then the season changed and one day it was gone. We still miss it.

But a second bird has arrived to take its place. This bird is very tiny (almost too small to swallow the meal worms), its colors are muted, but it  is a real character anyway. One day we spotted it on a little scrappy piece of land by the porch. As we do whenever we see a new bird, we poured a handful of worms on the patch of land, and it instantly began picking them up. The next day when we got up in the morning and came out and looked at the patch of land, it was already there waiting for us. It has been coming every day since. The bird is a Bewick's Wren, a tiny brown bird with a very expressive tail which it often carries cocked up at about 45 degrees. It looks like it's planning to stay with us, at least for a while. Here are a few pictures.