WEIT regular Diana MacPherson has sent us these beautiful photographs of sparrows. She writes:
Young Sparrow (Passer domesticus) On Weigela Branch Watch for Food Opportunities.
Young Sparrows (Passer domesiticus) On Weigela Branch Watch for Food Opportunities
Young Sparrows (Passer domesiticus) On Weigela Branch – What squabbling. Birds are so expressive!
Don’t Look Now, But a Bird Is Watching You (Young Sparrows (Passer domesticus))
Young Sparrows (Passer domesticus) In the Sun
And finally, Stephen Barnard sent in an amazing photograph of a Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum) catching mayflies.
Beautiful photos, Diana!
Thanks! The young ones are out in a second batch this year and I still think they look turtlish, especially with their yellow beaks.
They’re gorgeous – I rather like sparrows, especially the young ones. I think they’re greatly under-appreciated. Mid-winter here, and ours are clearly feeling a bit hungry judging by the way I get mobbed whenever I feed them.
Second batch! We’ll never run out of sparrows. Robins either for that matter. Our local flock is double-batching all over the place. You could trip over them.
It’s good to see the house sparrow doing well in the US. Here in London (UK) we see so few these day. Once they were ubiquitous and plentiful, and known as ‘your cockney sparrer’. Also spudger. They have lost nest sites to better roofing and lives to cats and traffic, but no-one is sure.
That would be Canada 😉
Here purists will say “those aren’t native” when you show pictures of your sparrows but I don’t care. They are here now and they are cute. Besides, I have bird boxes up and bluebirds nesting in them (English Sparrows are often criticized for taking the nests from bluebirds). The male bluebird likes to perch on a pea trellis & watch the sparrows. If one ventures near his box, he chases it away!
I hope you’ll take some photos of the bluebird, Diana. I love those too.
Marvelous photos from both you and Stephen. Thanks!
Either somebody was very lucky to just happen to catch the moment a bird caught a bug or put an awful lot of time and planning into getting just such a shot — and I think we all know what the answer is….
And didn’t you see the documentary? The birds are always watching you!
b&
Ha ha – the turtlish & pensive look is pretty funny.
I love cedar waxwings – they are so bluejay/cardinalesque. I don’t think they are very common where I am. Up north, much more so.
I’ve never seen one before – it’s a fantastic pic!
We used to occasionally see them in Cambridge. Lots of cardinals too and once in a while buntings, orioles and bluebirds, among the more common species, but less so in Waterloo.
There are a lot less butterflies and bees here too, unfortunately, because of loss of habitat.
Are you in Ontariario, Paprika?
Yes, southwestern.
Somehow I hadn’t realized that till you mentioned Cambridge and Waterloo in the same sentence. I’m in Oakville. Are you a true Canuck like Diana, or a transplant like me?
Yeah I think we are in the same hood. I’m not far out of Brantford/Paris area.
So, maybe you bump into Wayne Gretzky at the mall from time to time. Give him my regards.
Not Wayne but I’ve bumped into his dad Walter at the dentist.
So, maybe you should give Walter a hockey puck and a utility knife and ask if Wayne would autograph it. 😎
Walter’s a big deal. Everyone loves him and bombards him telling him how much they love him and Wayne. I’d never get near him though I was also once in an elevator with him in Toronto. It’s funny because I don’t like to bug people and he looked at me as if he wondered how I didn’t know who he was.
sub
I’m sorry if I upset anyone but, in my opinion, every House Sparrow in this country could die tomorrow and the only thing I’d regret is the loss of them as food for predators: they were brought into the U.S. to fight a plague of caterpillars on wheat but it was found, too late, that they preferred wheat to caterpillars!
They are nasty, filthy, noisy creatures that raise young all year round if the food is available, which means that if you feed them, there will be more and more until they drive all the other small birds away from the feeder (One nasty winter, I saw a woodpecker come to the ground beneath a friend’s feeder; a male sparrow got a little too “cheeky” with him, and he damn near killed it before it got away!). I’ve even heard of observations of them killing other birds’ young in their nests.
Had a friend call me up a few days ago: he has a small flock of chickens and he said the sparrows are eating up to a third of their food every day, and crapping in their waterers (they can carry numerous diseases), and he was begging me for advice as to how to get rid of them. Their nests are unsightly, smelly, and a fire hazard, and, over the years, many a vehicle that has sat idle for a while has burst into flames when started up, because of an unnoticed sparrow nest in the engine compartment.
I refer to them as, “Flying mice”, and Starlings as, “Flying rats”. A flock of them is like having a street gang in your neighborhood; when two of them fight, the others all gather round to watch and egg them on, just like a YouTube video. I was driving past a country store in a small Missouri town once that had big sliding wooden doors on the side for unloading feed, etc. A mob of sparrows was on the ground near the doors watching two males fight. Suddenly, an orange cat exploded out of a gap under the doors and seized one of the combatants, putting the rest to flight- well done!
My Mom has a small flock and had a similar problem with the neighborhood birds eating lots of chicken food, so Dad built a feeder for her with a cantilevered lid that raises when the hen steps on a platform in front of it. It’s weighted so chickens are the only birds around heavy enough to lift the lid. He found the plans somewhere on the ‘Net, but you should also be able to find commercial versions for sale.
b&
I think you’re dangerously close to violating Da Roolz. In particular, #19.