Lin, I'm spending far too long gazing at your eaglets! Fascinating - they look so terribly fragile and delicate, but when they face the camera you can see the ghost of their future strength. We have golden eagles in the UK, but mostly in Scotland; also some white tailed eagles.

I don't think there's any nest action yet at the Loch of Lowes osprey nest; I'll let you know if I hear anything. In the meantime here's an up-close-and-personal-with-a-parrot photo (at the Brazilian bird sanctuary). I like it because you can see that the parrot was as inquisitive about me as I was about him (her?).

And what a handsome devil he is, Mika! (assuming he's a male)

oooh! THAT is a wonderful close-up photo of the parrot!

This event takes place every year and helps track birds. There is also a Christmas count.

https://www.audubon.org/conten...

Thanks, Debbie and Becky. I love this thread, but fear that I have little to contribute except for 'exotics' that I meet on our miscellaneous voyages... But everyone is really patient and easy-going when I sneak in a few non-local, non-February photos. And talking of exotics, what about that cassowary!!! Need to read up on that one!
Amazing bunting pics, amazing eagle pics! I know from my extensive collection of blurry smudgy photos that it's really not easy to take a photo of a bird in flight and capture the shape and colour of the feathers - great photographic skill... so to you and

Becky, You did nail it! I believe it is the female indigo bunting. I can't believe none of us thought of that possibility before!!!
This:
Im­ma­ture and winter female: more rufescent overall than breeding female, with blurry streaking on breast and flanks.
From:
http://animals.nationalgeograp...
Fits to a T. I did not believe the photos on the Cornell site quite matched your photo -- the color on yours was slightly different -- yours had a roufous quality to it, plus there is some greenish brown in the tail area there. How about these photos? Perfect matches:
Look at the bill in this one -- the upper part being dark & lower being light just like your photo
https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

And in this one you can clearly see the coloration in the tail that matches yours
http://www.pbase.com/dadas115/...

Look at this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You did it girl!!!!!!
Now you need to call those bunting banders!

Some far away, fairly bad photos of a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers in the pecan grove today. Darn things kept hiding behind branches.

Mika, we love ALL birds, whether exotic or the regular garden variety that most of us see around our property so please share whatever bird photos you have! Such beautiful colors on that Parrot, I love that close up shot!

Ann, I like your shots of those Pileated Woodpeckers with their vivid red crests! I wonder if perhaps that's a mated pair? The one on the bottom appears to have a black malar stripe on the face and may be a female. I can't see the face on the one above clearly. The female Pileated has a black forehead and black malar face stripe while the male has a red forehead and a red malar face stripe. How cool it would be if it's a mated pair! If they are nesting on your property, you may see some young ones in the spring!

Rainy and dreary here this afternoon but I did get a couple of pictures before the rain started.

Blue Jay's in a neighbors Elm tree. I noticed one feeding the other but don't know if it's a juvenile or if it's feeding it's mate:


Mourning Dove perched in a Crepe Myrtle tree and then preening it's feathers


Palm Warbler


Red-winged Blackbird, photo taken through the window because it was raining

Beautiful Lin! I am so jealous of your red winged blackbirds!!! I WISH we would get some here but so far I have not seen a one.

Those Pileateds ARE a mated pair. I can't tell you exactly which ones are in the photos but I can tell you there are THREE here. The third one was not on that tree at that time with the other 2 but on another tree. The 3 were working the pecan trees like crazy today, all staying close but not always necessarily on the same tree. They were all communicating a lot. I know 1 is their offspring but which exact 2 of the 3 are in those photos I can not say.

mellielong said:Isn't there a bird identification site anywhere on the internet? Like what BAMONA is for moths and butterflies (for North America, anyway)? I would think someone out there would want to track data on birds just like we do insects. But I know some sites only track certain birds, not all, so maybe that's part of the problem? Anyone know of a site like I'm talking about that would help when we can't identify a bird?

That's what I use iNaturalist for, and not just birds but all forms of life. I feel bad though that I recommended it for Becky to id that warbler and nobody has helped with it yet. I don't really know what happened there because birds usually get very quick ids, and she had good pictures to go off of too. Usually the only ones I don't get ids on within a day or two are those species that are really hard to id from photos alone. In my case that is usually the groupings of flycatchers or groupings of thrushes that look alike. I've got over 200 bird observations there where I got an id confirmation to make it research grade, and only 8 that didn't (and they are those tricky species).

Only reason I can think of that she didn't get an id is that it is a tricky one, or she just happened to upload at a bad time and most of the people that give out ids missed it somehow. That site is all just fellow naturalists, although most of them do seem to work in the wildlife related sciences. Some get designated as curators, but they do more work on keeping the taxa database up to date, than working on ids for people I think.

I use BugGuide a lot for identifying insects and spiders and also BAMONA for butterflies and moths to a lesser extent. I haven't seen any part of eBird that is for help on identifications, but maybe I just missed it. It seems like they would at least have a forum or something there for that. It might help ensure that the checklists people are submitting are accurate and complete?

I usually just look in my bird books to try to identify birds but my books are packed away for our move in a couple of months. There are a few really good sites for help in bird identification:

Audubon's guide to North American birds: http://www.audubon.org/bird-gu...
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/...
http://www.birdwatchersdigest....
http://animals.nationalgeograp...

This site has photos of birds of the U.S., Canada and Central America: http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/b...
This site has ID for Eastern U.S. Songbirds by color: http://www.birdnature.com/iden...
This site shows how to learn birds by shape, color etc: http://www.wildbirds.com/Ident...

Great photos. Love those woodpeckers. What I wouldn't give to actually see one in real life! I didn't do much bird watching today. And it is raining tonight. Supposed to get colder tonight and for most of this week. When I say colder, I mean lows in the 40's and 50's at night and daytime in the 60's. Actually nice weather if this rain would just stop. Ugh!

Ann - Thanks! I kept looking at that bird and thinking it looked similar in the face to a bunting, but wasn't sure about the tan color until I thought of Indigo and on a hunch decided to look up female Indigo Bunting! Sure enough, the streaks on it's throat/breast showed up in one of the online photos, so I knew I had the right ID. I sent a photo to the bander and she confirmed it's ID. It was driving me nuts not to be able to ID this bird who is a frequent visitor to my feeder. I felt kind of stupid calling it the mystery bird.

I usually start with my guide books too, then go to the allaboutbirds site or google images if needed. Sometimes though I still need help with tricky ones. Inaturalist has been helpful with some of those, but it is also just good for keeping lists and contributing to citizen science stuff. I do a lot more insects than birds there though, because my variety of birds is pretty limited most of the year.

Had a smaller hawk sitting on my cable tv line today. Ran in for binoculars and camera and he took off for the woods where he was too hard to see clearly.

I woke up to loud bird calls this morning - two big birds circling the house up in the air and calling loudly "Kurrrr, Kurrrrr, Kurrrr" while flying. Caught a flash out the window but just a few minutes ago they were back, and I rushed out but didn't get a picture.

Could they be Sandhill Cranes? They were flying with necks extended, and their bellies were light colored, but I really couldn't get much more detail than that. I now have my phone in my pocket and the camera set up outside on the tripod, but my zoom isn't much good when the birds are moving fast.

I just googled "sandhill crane call" and it sounds a lot like what I was hearing this morning. Goofy birds, calling while flying!

IbisFla said:
I always thought that vultures and buzzards were the same things, but after looking it up, a buzzard is more related to a hawk. They eat live prey, and their heads are feathered.

Vultures, on the other hand, primarily eat carrion and have a bald head. And they're not that cute.

Always learning something on this forum

Me, too!
Thanks for the lesson!

So when "the buzzards are circling", they're circling DYING prey, not dead. Right?

Wow - I can't believe I am FIVE pages behind after going awol only a few days!

glengarry23 said:

Is that suet in your feeder or a fruit of some kind?

@dyzzypyxxy Elaine, how cool to get to see a flock of Sandhills flying over! I've never seen them in flight and the most I've ever seen walking around at one time is three. I found this neat page when googling that has a bunch of different bird calls/sounds. http://www.junglewalk.com/popu...