I’ve been spending substantial time lately catching up on photo processing.  I’ve had a bounty of photographic opportunities in the yard over the past couple of weeks and I’ve gotten substantially behind on processing the photos.

There photos are ones I took on 9/12/2015.  There are no unusual birds here but I did get what I consider nice photos.

Red-breasted nuthatch…

Male and female Anna’s hummingbirds…

A Chestnut-backed chickadee.  For whatever reason I usually have difficulty getting these birds into good focus.

A post-bath Song sparrow….

And finally, an unidentified raptor that flew overhead while I was monitoring the yard for activity.  I’ll have to ask for some help with the id since I can’t find a raptor that meets all of the characteristics that this one seems to possess.  I’ll try to update the site once I get confirmation of the species.

On Monday, September 14, I received a late morning call from Cap Sante neighbors that they had a Barred owl on their property.  I grabbed by camera and hustled over to find a Barred owl in full view.  As we watched the owl flew to a patch of ground cover near the window, snatched a mouse and then flew to a different limb to devour the creature in a single gulp… which is why we have owl pellets.  Fifty-eight photos later I had all the owl photos I could use for the morning.

At one point when the owl changed perches we saw the wings of another bird flash and we discovered it was an accipiter that briefly harassed the owl.

I arrived back home and glanced out the window at my watercourse just in time to see a pair of Yellow-rumped warblers (Audubon race) so I grabbed my camera again.  They were gone by the time I got outside but I decided to wait awhile.  Eventually a Golden-crowned kinglet showed up at the watercourse.  Bird Notes, on NPR’s nMorning Edition, recently noted that these birds migrate not north and south but between elevations, with the birds breeding at the higher elevations during the spring and summer and returning to the lower elevations for the winter.  The birds only began arriving back at my house (at roughly 100′ elevation!) in the past week or so.

Being a very early riser I was seriously in need of a nap, but yard activity was interesting enough to delay the nap for a little longer.  I was glad I did because the next interesting bird to enter the yard was a Hermit’s thrush, a bird that I might not see in a year of birding, especially in our yard.  I think I remember seeing one on the Cap Sante Overlook early last spring, but I was unable to obtain a photo at the time.

On Monday (9/7/2015) I was able to spend a little more time in the yard and scored on two other yard rarities… a Pacific Slope flycatcher and a Warbling vireo. (I needed help with the verification, but that’s the nice thing about photographs.)

The vireo accessed the watercourse for a bath three times. Like the White-eyed vireo I photograph at my sister’s house outside Austin, Texas, this bird bathes “on the fly”. It skims the water then finds a perch where it preens furiously. Since it staged by the watercourse in various places I was able to get a number of good photographs of it.

And finally, we’ve had a number of juvenile Northern flickers that began frequenting the yard for suet during the past month or so, after a total absence of flickers for the earlier part of the summer.  I have been able to obtain very good photos of the flickers, including this female.

I guess that technically it is still summer, but our weather of late is sliding into fall.  I spent about five hours outside Saturday (9/5/2015) and had a considerable number of photos to show for it.  I photographed two noteworthy visitors… a Stellar’s jay and a Black-throated Gray warbler.  It’s probably been over a year since a Stellar’s jay has visited the yard and I can’t understand why.  We seem to have good habitat.  I’ve often thought that the jays we have make an occasional foray across the channel from Guemes since I have friends over there who have them and I seldom see them on our island (Fidalgo).

The second rarity, the Black-throated Gray warbler, was here for an extended time last summer and usually enjoyed bathing in our watercourse several times a day.  We had probably had them in the past but I probably failed to pick them out of all the Black-capped chickadees, of which we have many.  My guess is that this is a juvenile.  There are at least two in the yard at the same time, and possibly more.

Other birds I photographed… a male Anna’s hummingbird and a White-crowned sparrow.

End of summer visitors detracted from the amount of time I had for birding activities this past week.  And I don’t appear to be attracting any interesting fall visitors to the yard.  But it’s hard to keep a dedicated bird photographer down!

The American goldfinches are still around, but I note that the vast majority are juveniles that came into being this year.  Some of them, such as this juvenile morphing into male plumage, are pretty rough looking.

And not content to share the same perch, this juvenile is giving a not-so-subtle hint to its temporary perch-mate.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen a Rufous hummingbird in the yard, but we still have a couple of Anna’s hummingbirds.  While I’m not sure as to the sex of the first bird, I’m fairly certain that the second (with the red salvia) is a male.

And of final interest in the yard, while we were without Northern Flickers all summer, we’re now having visits from both juvenile males and females.  We lost our big dead pine tree (it fell over!) which was our primary staging structure for the flickers, but they are adapting very well to the new habitat.  This is one of the juvenile males.