Backyard Bird watching

[Alimantado]

[quote="LAF"]I just recently got a cute bird bath and my husband put up a bird feeder ( I won it in a contest ) and we also planted some flowers near the bird bath .Anyway I have been having fun watching the birds take a bath and the diffrent birds that come to the feeder.
So far a Blue Jay a Cardinal ,a whole lot of Mocking Birds and just today a beautiful one which I have no clue what he is .
I really like it and am going to try and figure out all the bird names .Anyone else like this?[/quote]

To make it even more fun, you should see if there are any garden bird surveys you can take part in where you live. I work for a bird charity in the UK, and we run a national one that's quite popular: http://www.bto.org/gbw/index.htm

[LAF]

[quote="Alimantado"][quote="LAF"]I just recently got a cute bird bath and my husband put up a bird feeder ( I won it in a contest ) and we also planted some flowers near the bird bath .Anyway I have been having fun watching the birds take a bath and the diffrent birds that come to the feeder.
So far a Blue Jay a Cardinal ,a whole lot of Mocking Birds and just today a beautiful one which I have no clue what he is .
I really like it and am going to try and figure out all the bird names .Anyone else like this?[/quote]

To make it even more fun, you should see if there are any garden bird surveys you can take part in where you live. I work for a bird charity in the UK, and we run a national one that's quite popular: http://www.bto.org/gbw/index.htm[/quote]


Thanks I will have to check into it

[Psalms18_28]

I think my favorite thing is watching birds. They seem to love my backyard too. I have blue jay, red cardinals, woodpecker, and a few other birds but I don't know the name of them. I used to keep birdseeds but the squirrels and chipmunks get them before the birds do.

[churchmouse7]

My daughter and I enjoy bird watching too. She has some binoculars and a bird book to identify them. The very first day she got them there was a beautiful red cardinal sitting in a tree right in front of our house! We recently saw a hawk which was unusual I thought since we live in the city.

[Alimantado]

Great to see so many people enjoying the countryside! Those who want to really get the most out of bird-life should try 'nest finding'- which is what I do. A nest of birds' eggs is one of the prettiest sights of spring and summer- a small beautiful piece of nature that is hidden away.

It can take real skill to find the nests of many birds- hours of watching a pair back to the nest and pin-pointing where it is from a distance. I know a guy who spent three years and many hours in the field watching a pair of grasshopper warblers that would return each year to breed at the same spot. Finally after rising at dawn countless times to watch the birds at work, he finally found the nest with young in it. The adults will drop down many yards away from the nest and run through the undergrowth to get to it- so it is almost impossible to pinpoint.


Yellowhammer nest

[Psalms18_28]

One time, I found a nest in my car port. unfortunately, the car port has a wire net on it to keep birds away and somehow mother got in anyway and built it's nest there. Later, one of the baby bird fell off his nest and got trapped in the net. We did managed to get the the baby bird loose, but it was hard to put it back in the nest because it was so high up and we couldn't do it without removing the whole net (which cover the whole car port). We ended up taking the baby bird to the wildlife rescue.

We have several birdhouses, and I can see nests in them. One time I found a nest in a baby pine tree and showed it to my son. He loved it!

[tired]

We have a bald eagle that lives in the Pasadena, Md area. I looked up in a tree and saw a bald eagle about 50 ft. from me. It blew my mind. I asked DNR about it and they said he has a range of about 20 miles and is seen in the Glen Burnie and Annapolis area to. SOOOOO COOOOL

[kevinmiller]

I wish that bald eagle would come up towards Carroll County. :uuhm:
This is the best I've gotten for big birds close-up, a turkey vulture perched up on our playground.
Then there was also the time when an actual wild turkey was stuck inside our fence. I had to go out there and scare it in order to get it to fly over top of it. Duh...
Then, we usually get a migration of birds every year, as in the picture. That picture contains about a third of the birds in our back yard, no joke. They darkened the sky, the chirping was deafening and the sound of their wings beating when they all at once took flight was incredible. :lol

[Psalms18_28]

That's alot of birds... I will take a picture today to show what going on my backyard because there are alot birds here too

[Sojourner]

Wow, Kevin! That's a heap of birds! I was in Alabama several years ago and while driving along I could hear thousands of birds but couldn't see them....or so I thought. They were all sitting in a couple bare trees, but they looked like leaves. I honked the horn and watched them fly all in one motion and go right back to the trees. Here are a couple pics....

[kevinmiller]

Wow, that's really cool looking. We had a ton in the woods across the street as well. It was amazing. One part of the flock would start to rise and it was like a domino affect(only going up instead of down) as the whole flock rose and moved in one direction and the sky became black with them.