Saturday, June 7, 2008

A Warm Afternoon

In Texas, you can't pick a worse time to go birding than an afternoon in June. But I hadn't been out all week, and there was a breeze and some cloud cover. So I grabbed my binocs and my camera and spent about an hour and a half birding up Stillforest and then back down Broadmeade. I had a better time than I thought I would, talking to a few neighbors and just barely finding 20 species of birds. Near Chesterforest and Stillforest I did not see any birds on the Red-shouldered Hawk nest, but I did find 2 juveniles perched nearby. I assume they are siblings from the nest. I got this picture of one.

On my way back I found an American Robin nest on Broadmeade near Hazelhurst and got this picture of one of the parents feeding the chicks. I think there are at least 3 chicks on the nest. At Norchester I checked on the Broad-winged Hawk nest and saw 2 adults. I have not seen any nestlings or juveniles yet.

It was surprisingly fun even though I mostly only saw common summer- and year-round-resident species. This makes me hope that my next NASWC article idea will be popular. I'm going to list the 20 most common year-round resident birds in the neighborhood with short descriptions and links to more information about them. And I'm going to challenge people to try and find them all and send me their progress. Then in the NASWC newsletter we'll list people who have seen at least 10, at least 15, and all 20 species. Hopefully it will capture a few people's interest!

2 comments:

S. Brown said...

Speak of the devil, I was just looking at the Austin Bloggers Metablog, and your blog was at the top of the page.

gbsbbui <---- the word verification (I try to pronounce them, but they are rather stingy with their vowels and put them in odd places when they do have them.)

bqdul <---- the second word verification because I seem to have messed something up.

Mikael Behrens said...

Yes, that's my savvy blog marketing at work! :)