An Hour on the Streets

This morning I got a late start and spent just a little over an hour birding a few streets of our neighborhood. It was a comfortable but breezy morning and wind makes it hard to find birds. Birds are so light that they usually stay hunkered down and hidden when it's windy. So the birding was slow until I stopped at a brush pile on Barryknoll St. and pished. The brush pile exploded with bird life, including this Orange-crowned Warbler, about half a dozen House Sparrows, a Ruby-crowned Kinglet, 2 Carolina Wrens, 1 Bewick's Wren, 1 Northern Mockingbird (pictured below), and 2 Northern Cardinals. I could hardly believe all these birds had been silently hiding right in front of me. I love brush piles!