I’m still working on porting my photos to the new iMac, so there won’t be any photos for this blog post. However I do have some significant news.

I noticed on Sunday, November 16 (2014) that our Pine siskins had returned. I took the trouble to investigate my historical records and noted that the siskins VERY ABRUPTLY  disappeared in August, 2013. They are normally our most numerous winter yard bird, but in that respect they were replaced this last winter by Dark-eyed juncos of the Oregon race. The juncos have always been numerous, just not as numerous as the siskins. I had seen numerous small birds flying around the yard and suspected Bush tits, but they turned out upon observation to be the siskins.

Yesterday the siskins were all over the yard, and I estimate that there may have been as many as 20 or more in the yard at one time. They seemed elated at the new (to them) watercourse and at one point I observed six bathing within about a foot of each other,  others in parts of the watercourse I couldn’t directly observe, and still others fluttering around the watercourse. So here’s a big “welcome back” to our Pine siskins!

And also on Sunday, while watching the siskins, I saw a single female Red crossbill in the watercourse. On Monday I observed three male crossbills in the watercourse at one time, then later a mature female and two younger females. Then still later another male, this one a seemingly uniform reddish-orange, visited the watercourse. This last male was very distinctive , seemingly lacking the mottling in coloration that seems to be the trademark of the species. So all told there were at least seven crossbills visiting the watercourse, four males and three females.

Given that the weather will probably hold another day (clear skies since last Thursday, when we returned from New Mexico), I’ll probably try to spend at least part of the afternoon in the yard with my camera. (More about New Mexico in a future blog.) I’ll be taking photos of the siskins that I missed last winter and hoping that unusual male crossbill makes a return visit.

And I’ve made some progress with my computer struggles, just not with my photos. This blog was written on my new iMac using a Microsoft ergonomic (split) keyboard. I had been extremely handicapped up until Sunday with having to use the extremely small Apple keyboard, my PC notebook keyboard and Appole’s mysterious mouse instead of my Logitech Optical Trackman. I’m now back in the groove and have the key entry tools that I’ve used for so long and to which I’ve gotten so habituated. And my iMac is communicating and exchanging data with my iPad and both will be doing the same with my new iPhone 6 which is supposed to be delivered sometime before the middle of December! This old dog is learning some new tricks (training session on the iPad this Tuesday morning) and it will soon be a new day coming!

I’m in the middle of a process to convert from a PC environment to an Apple environment. I’m actively using a new iMac and iPad but I have yet to convert my photos and Adobe Lightroom software to the new hardware.  And to make matters somewhat worse, the weather hasn’t  been conducive to photography.  Therefore, it’s been awhile since I last posted to this site.  I anticipate that I’ll try to have my problems worked out by about November 21, if not sooner… but that’s just a guess.

As part of this conversion I’m moving to a new email address.  I would post it here  but I understand that there is automated software that trolls the internet looking for email addresses to which spam can be sent.  However if you are a friend, send me an email to my old address, or post a message to my website and I’ll reply giving you my new email address.

I look forward to getting this site back up and running again with some new photos and hope you will return!

I’m going to open with some photos to get them to the top of the blog, and then position a text commentary at the bottom.

I’ve had several friends ask about my watercourse that was reconfigured with the help of ProScapes in early July.   This photo is of the watercourse and most of my yard photos are taken with the birds either in the watercourse or perched on nearby rocks or “staging sticks”.  I’m quite happy with this third iteration of the watercourse and am certain that any substantive changes are behind me.

These next three photos are of Yellow-rumped warblers.  I believe that all of these photos are of males of the Audubon race, but it’s sometimes difficult to classify the birds at this time of year with their non-breeding plumage and females and juveniles all moving through.

This next bird is a Spotted towhee (probably a male as evidenced by its bolder colors), generally a year-round resident of the yard.

And finally, I don’t generally photograph birds on feeders, but I liked the looks of this male Anna’s hummingbird accessing a feeder that is new for this year.  We have Anna’s hummingbirds here year-round whether we put out feeders or not, so I try to help them through the winter with some supplemental food.  We are careful to keep a feeder thawed on days with the temperatures below freezing.  Several years ago, when we had snow on the ground for about two weeks we had a male Anna’s hummingbird that survived that weather… but I don’t know how.

(You might note that while the hummingbird and front part of the perch are in relatively sharp focus, the stem of the feeder is blurred.  This feeder is quite small and the distance between the stem and hummingbird is probably less than three inches.  I’m probably about 20 feet away with a 400mm lens.  And that, my friends, is your photography lesson for ‘depth of field’ for the day!)

Now on to the narrative with the status of my yard birding…

I’ve noticed a lot of seasonal changes here in the yard. They seemed to have begun on about Saturday, October 11, 2014. I can’t attribute any of the changes to the weather although I’m sure that in some respects it has been at least partially responsible.

As those of you know who follow this blog, I had almost continuous birding-related photographic opportunities in the yard for most of the summer. The weather allowed me to spend more time in the yard and to some extent, the more time I spend in the yard the more birds I see and photograph. However the bird sightings have now fallen off, not only in terms of the diversity of species but also, with a few notable exceptions, the numbers of birds. In my mind and as I stated above, the big drop occurred on about October 11. This last week I’ve been able to spend some time in the yard and I’ve spent a lot of time peering out our kitchen window to assess bird activity, but for the most part things have changed… and not for the better.

There have been a good many periods of virtually no bird activity in the yard for an hour or more. I know because I’ve sat in my usual location with sometimes not so much as a single chickadee, nuthatch or even sparrow being evident. This could be partially attributable to a raptor… this past weekend on successive days I saw either an accipiter or a Merlin glide over the tops of the fir trees, meaning the bird had to be at least 150’ off the ground. In my Saturday sighting I saw a crow dive-bombing the top of a tree about two blocks away, and a short time later its activity continued in the top of one of my neighbor’s fir trees. I hadn’t observed the raptor enter the tree and it flew before I could ready my camera. However I haven’t seen a raptor in the yard in at least a couple of months.

We had a notable exception to the number of birds in the yard late in the afternoon on Sunday, October 19, 2014. I spend an hour or so in the yard on two occasions that day with very little to show for it. We had company coming at 4pm so I gave up the birding about 3:45pm. After our company arrived I glanced out the kitchen window and saw a lot of bird activity in the yard. Subsequent observations from the house allowed me to count at least four Yellow-rumped warblers that were in the yard at the same time. In all my observations for this year, I have never seen more than two Yellow-rumped warblers in the yard at one time. There also appeared to be other interesting birds, namely Golden-crowned kinglets. (Earlier in the afternoon I had a Ruby-crowned kinglet perch less than three feet from the end of my lens, but at that distance it was much too close and active for a photograph.)

It’s possible that the activity was related to the weather… we had an unseasonably warm day with temperatures in the mid-to-high 60s. Interestingly enough, I noticed that the high, broken clouds we had were coming from the southwest while many of the wind gusts were coming from the north! And we had been told, quite accurately, to expect wind in the afternoon and rain that evening. The weather forecasters got it right for once!

So, as I think I may have warned in previous blog posts, the times they are a changing. My opportunities for spending extended time in the yard will be gradually reduced as we ease more into fall. Not only will the weather be more inclement, but the number of birds in the yard may make it not worth my while to spend extended time in the yard for photographs. However, when the door is shut on one opportunity the door to another opens. I’ll probably soon be making vehicle expeditions to the western part of Skagit County searching out photographic opportunities among the raptors and shorebirds that will constitute my fare for much of the winter months. And this may mean that I won’t get the opportunity to update my blog as often. In theory the more inclement weather might give me the opportunity to catch up on processing some of the backlog of photos I took this past summer, but that’s always a formidable mountain that doesn’t always get addressed.

We’re apparently facing the end of our good weather so my birding activities will probably be curtailed somewhat.  However I sat in the yard for a couple of hours yesterday (10/9/2014) and had some very nice visitors.

I had no sooner moved to the yard than a Hutton’s vireo, a first-time visitor to the yard just a couple of weeks ago, flew down to one of the water features.  I managed a good many photos before it flew and disappeared from the yard.

My next set of interesting birds were a family of Red crossbills, consisting of an adult male, an adult female and three juveniles, one male and two females.

The juvenile male couldn’t get enough of the watercourse on the family visit and, unusual for these birds, he remained and took a long bath by himself.

That about does it for the rarer birds, but I also got some nice photos of a Red-breasted nuthatch, one of which I’ll include here…

I have a backlog of photos for the blog that I took earlier this week but have not completely processed.  I’ll try to post some of them this next weekend.

In mid-September I took a trip to the Winthrop area, an area I usually visit in June.  I was prepared to be somewhat disappointed in the number of birds/species I saw but I don’t think I was quite prepared for my overall disappointment.  Not only were the bird species significantly down but the number of birds I saw was also disappointing.  The biggest success of the trip is that I found a new (small) area in which to bird, and that area at least, had a plentiful supply of birds.

I actually encountered this Stellar’s jay at Washington Pass on my way home, but decided to include it in this group of photos.

There were three areas I found where some berries, which I couldn’t/can’t identify, were attracting a large number of birds.  The first area I encountered was at a small park on a Davis Lake, due south of the Bear Creek Golf Course.  Berry trees there were attracting a large number of White-crowned sparrows.  These berries, even though they appeared ripe, were somewhat difficult for the birds to remove from the trees.  As a result the sparrows tended to eat the berries in place instead of trying to remove them from the trees to deal with them.  You can see that this sparrow is eating the berry as it is still attached by its stem, and in the upper left of the photo is a berry that has already been ravaged.  (Does that berry look juicy… or what?)

The other main berry tree was at the end of the Pearrygin Lake East State Park camping area and that tree was frequented by several different species of birds, although I only saw American robins actually eating the berries.

And this next series of photos were taken from a small fishing access road adjacent to Pearrygin State Park West, which was closed due to road maintenance during the time I was there.

It appears that all of the trees with berries are probably the same species and if anyone knows what they are I would appreciate you contacting me.

And finally, at the same location, I photographed this Orange-crowned warbler…