What's your favourite bird? When I was a kid it was the bald eagle, I liked it so much I even learned its latin name which I still remember, almost forty years later. Haliaeetus leucocephalus. And eagles are still pretty damn cool, but through no fault of their own they also reek of American symbolism. Hmm. I kind of like hummingbirds. I installed a hummingbird feeder earlier this year but I didn't see any- maybe I was too late in the season to attract them, maybe they don't really frequent the area. How does one market to hummingbirds anyway? Mostly I have sparrows. They didn't care for the sunflower seed-heavy feed I put out this year. Usually they gobble the birdseed I put out in less than 24 hours but there's still some of that stuff left. 

Gotten a few different species this year too, which I haven't seen before. Hopefully it's a sign that bird populations in general are more healthy than they've been. Don't be fooled, though. Shifting baseline syndrome is definitely a thing. We tend to think the conditions (ecological conditions like faunal populations) we grew up with are normal, but really they were already in really bad shape, so when we perceive an improvement we are more impressed than we should be, since the actual baseline from whenever you want to measure it, say a hundred years ago or a thousand, was way way higher. There used to be ten billion passenger pigeons a hundred years ago, but now there are zero. Or when I was a kid, bald eagles were relatively rare, having been hurt by DDT and other things, but now they are much more common than in the 80s. But still not at their optimum population.

Anyway, my point was to post some of the pictures of cool birds I've taken this year. I no longer have a DLSR and I usually have to take pics quick before they fly away so I'm not saying these are amazing photos. But it is kind of amazing to me the variety of birds we can get in my neck of the Woods since when I was kid the baseline was basically sparrow and ravens. 

Western Tanager:

House Thrush:

This one just showed up the other day and I don't know what it is. 

And then at work- where I used to work I mean which is still weird to say- we always had a bunch of these flying around. They rarely sat still long enough to get a good look at them but they definitely had a red colouring, but I'm pretty sure they are different than a house thrush:

So yeah. I like birds. Also at work I got to watch a juvenile bald eagle practice flying, with I assume one of its parents supervising. I took some video but the eagle is hard to see, I think I mainly just got the adult. Well, maybe I'll upload it somewhere one of these days. It's a bit of a rigmarole not having my own computer though so not right now. I was going to talk about Wingspan and Mariposas tonight too, but those could really go in their own posts.