Birding!
- Thread starter jjohnwm
- Start date
That's probably true for the most part...but not always. For example, one of my favourite bird species here at home is the Black-capped Chickadee. It's one of my most common backyard birds, a non-migratory year-round resident, a tiny energetic ball of fluff that survives and endures the harshest weather. There's a dozen or more of them right outside my window as I type this.
But...they are fairly drab little guys. Black, white, gray, a touch of buff...cute, but not amazing. There are several other Chickadee species in various parts of NA, including the Boreal which is also local to me, but none of them are eye-poppers, although they make up for it in personality.
Now you have Chickadees as well...but they are correctly referred to as Tits. You have Blue Tits, Coal Tits, Marsh Tits, Crested Tits, Bearded Tits...the list goes on and on. One of the most common and most impressive is the Great Tit; it's like a Chickadee on steroids, much bigger, much brighter colouration and a striking pattern, and equally as bold as our birds.
I had a layover in Frankfurt once, not enough time to really do much or go far into the city, but just enough time for me to take a walk down a laneway that led from the airport to a nearby wooded area. I got about a dozen lifers along the way, but what really struck me was all the Great Tits. Great Tits were abundant; everywhere I looked, I would see more Great Tits. I would stop to study and admire some Great Tits here...only to be distracted by still more Great Tits over there. I typically consider myself more of a Raptor Man at home, but on that day at least I was definitely a...well...you know...
Is that what they mean when they talk about a titillating experience?
Yes, this is very true. There are tits everywhere in blighty, the country is absolutely full of them. The greatest concentration of tits is in the house of commons!! Lol.
In my neck of the woods the coal tit and blue tit are everywhere, very common. We see the odd great tit too. Crested, bearded and marsh, never seen those. There is one other kind, the long tailed tit, which I believe is very rare.
I'm just so happy that our tits out trump your drab chickadees, lol.
Chickadees are amazing.
Often I've seen them fly from a tree across the yard down to a feeder pluck a single seed and return to the tree to eat it. And wondered how to bui
to eat it consuming less energy than contained in the seed.
Often I've seen them fly from a tree across the yard down to a feeder pluck a single seed and return to the tree to eat it. And wondered how to bui
to eat it consuming less energy than contained in the seed.
Another win for using scientific names instead of common - but you wouldn’t think that would matter for an easily identifiable species…
I guess I’ll go back to my usual identification behavior - “big bird, small bird, that one looks like a dove”
It’s sad to think that there’s actually people out there who see a bird or an insect (like Gypsy - sorry, spongy - moths) and get offended by its name.
I wonder when this fish will get its name changed:
Or does it not matter unless 2-3 people are offended by the name?
Slippery dick - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
Will the killdeer (one of my favorite birds ever since they nested in my backyard) get renamed because PETA doesn’t like anything that promotes animal cruelty (except themselves)?
I have heard of that fish and when I see its name I always laugh lol.
Some birds just don't get it, do they?
Snow Buntings are really cool little sparrow-like birds that breed in the far north, and only appear down in my area when they migrate down in the dead of winter. You'll see them in big flocks flying over large open fields, each bird looping up and down, flashing black and white plumage as they go. At a distance they look like little twinkling jewels whipping through the air, or ice crystals blown by the wind. When we occasionally get them in the yard, they are attracted to seed I spread on our long driveway, one of the few times I actually put feed right on the ground. A big flock comes in and descends on the driveway; they hop about scarfing up seeds, but if I open the door to go outside, or sometimes even move too abruptly indoors, they all take off like crazy. They fly a half-kilometer that way, then a kilometer that way, then make a big 2-kilometer half circle...and end up landing back in the driveway, 30 meters from where they started. What a ridiculous waste of energy!
Lots of well-known birding hotspots like Point Pelee are always trying to get people to not disturb large flocks of migrating shorebirds, because they need to build up reserves of energy for their upcoming long migrations, but they waste way too much of it in the same way. Too many disturbances wasting too much energy can totally mess up their migrations.
Maybe that is where the term "bird brained" originates from, lol.
Nah, more like Rainbow Lorikeets, Musk Lorikeets, Scaly breasted lorikeets, Galah, Sulphur Crested Cockatoo, Yellow tail black cockatoo, Corellas, King Parrots, Eastern Rosella, Crimson Rosellas, Noisy Miners, Butcherbirds, Currawongs, Magpies, Red Wattlebirds, Little Wattlebirds, Superb Fairy Wrens, Willy Wagtails, Pardalotes, Kookaburras, Tawny frogmouths, White Ibis, Crested pigeons, Masked Lapwings, Pacific Black Ducks, Wood Ducks, Purple Swamphens, Dusky moorhens just to name some that i can see just going for a ~20 min walkLike Diamond Doves?
Can see more species if I get into some national park. Should make a list of every bird i've seen in my herping and fishing ventures.
Sounds loud…
Any parakeets by you or is that a different part of Australia?
