How you can tell it’s fall….

September 20, 2009 by chuq · Comments
Filed under: Birdwatching

There’s a simple way to tell that fall has arrived in the Bay Area, the wintering birds start arriving in force. I saw my first White-Crowned Sparrows of the fall this week, so I know that my favorite time of year has arrived.

The White-Crowned sparrow summers far north in Alaska and the Canadian tundra and high alpine environments. When fall approaches, they move south, many times more than 2,000 miles, to their wintering grounds in the U.S. They’re shrub birds that tend to hunt bugs on the ground, turning over leaf matter and pouncing on what they find underneath. They’re not fancy birds, but I find them a fun bird to sit and watch as small flocks hop around and turn over leaves looking for lunch.

And they’re a visible example of why Silicon Valley is a nice place to live — even the birds know they can come here and not worry about the winter weather many other areas deal with. Summer, on the other hand, is a pretty boring time to birdwatch the bay area; once spring migration ends all of the birds have settled in to nest and raise their young, so not much happens, unless you go off finding the babies.

That’s something I had some luck doing this summer for some reason, even though I really wasn’t planning to do that. We had a very successful summer in the yard at the feeder, along with the usual healthy supply of house sparrows and house finches, we had another successful nesting of Oak Titmice, at least two Anna’s nests (one front yard, one back yard), Black Phoebe (who’ve learned to scarf cat food), a probable nesting of california towhee, and we have at least two, and possibly three, nesting pairs of chestnut backed chickadees, and all seem to have fledged young. Nearby we have had a nesting Cooper’s pair for a few years, although we haven’t found the nest (somewhere in Central Park) or confirmed kids. They’re fairly common visitors in the back yard, and occasional diners. There seem to be Nutall’s Woodpecker nests in Central Park, too, because they’ve been returning visitors this summer (where in the past, they showed up spring and fall as they moved territory). The Mockingbird families that have owned the neighborhood were less noticeable this year. While the mockingbird known as “pissed off cockatiel” has been around yodelling all summer, we never did hear “Car alarm”.

A new resident in the back yard recently is a Bewick’s Wren. I saw one a few years back in the yard, but this year, it’s been a regular singing visitor, seen or heard on and off since at least June.

As far as I know, the Bald Eagle nest I was tracking successfully fledged one youngster in mid-June, about when I estimated it’d leave the nest; by June 20, the nest was empty, and while I saw the female there on the 20th, she showed no signs of distress, but she sat on the nest and called a number of times, mostly looking — anthropomorphism time — lonely. I also found an American Kestrel nest near there that trip and spent a chunk of time watching a baby kestrel as it started exploring the trees around the nest. It was pre-flight, but to the point where it could hop and climb and “oomph” itself about six feet to get to a nearby tree, all the while yodelling at full volume and making a huge racket. Great fun.I also had great luck down on Marsh road with a family of baby western bluebirds:

and while down in SoCal visiting mom, I happened to run into mom and her two baby Bullock’s Orioles, as mom was trying (without much success) to wean them onto finding their own food — she kept flying to a berry bush, and when they flew in and asked to be fed, she flew off again, leaving them there. Not sure they were ready to cooperate: