Today at the feeders...

[nwhiker]

Today at my bird feeders, in addition to the usual suspects (finches, redwing blackbirds, cow birds, pine siskins, various sparrows, flickers, junkos, towhees, my beloved chickadees -two kinds- and downy or hairy woodpeckers) I have seen: gold finches (we used to have loads of them, but they've been rarer these past few years), a gros beak, a Western tanager (glorious large yellow bird with a red/pink head) and just now a humongo pileated at the suet feeder.

Needless to say, no photos. I need to set up the camera on a tripod with remote trigger!

Comments

[camelsamba]

how cool! my neighbor has bird feeders that I can see from our kitchen, but i haven't seen that much variety on their feeders. Our library has bird cams available for checkout (https://aadl.org/catalog/record/10639705 ) which is how I verified that a raccoon was going in and out of our chimney (that formerly served the long-ago-replaced furnace).

[nwhiker]

That's cool about the library renting the cameras out! I'm sure the raccoon thing was super fun. NOT. Did it do a lot of damage?

[camelsamba]

This happened about 2 years ago, mid-April. I had been hearing scrabbling in the chimney around sunset, which prompted the camera checkout. Quick consult with former boss (UMMZ mammal curator) suggested that was probably too early for a litter to have been born (from email “I doubt that there are babies yet, but it has been a very strange spring, so who knows?”), but it would be good to act quickly. Phone consults trying to get quotes warned me that our roof would be covered with with raccoon pheremones, which meant that once they removed this one, other raccoons might find us and move in; that new ‘coons might try to rip the existing (plastic) vent covers off the roof and could end up in the attic. The middle $$ of 3 options was to install metal guards over all those vents. Former boss said that was indeed plausible behavior, so we opted to get the covers. Then when they came out to do an assessment on site and peeked in the chimney clear-out, we discovered the babies had already been born (I have pix). He told me once they trapped the female outside the house they would remove the juveniles by hand - but apparently us checking spooked her and she moved them out that night (I heard a lot of scrabbling that night, later than usual). We haven’t had any issues since (but it’s only been two years, should I knock on wood??)