Good morning on this first Sunday of May! It’s sunny and mild, a beautiful spring morning! The trees are full of bright yellow birds, they are taking a short break from eating. Oops, they are starting to come back down now. Plus there are several purple finches here now, 4 bright red males and at least 3 females that are brown striped birds, looking much like a sparrow but with a larger beak. I really wish they would change the name of this finch to something more appropriate. Even the experts agree it is a raspberry red, though in the spring it looks even brighter red. So why purple? Because it looks purple they say, when you get it in just the right light conditions. Obviously not in the light conditions we get.

Oh well. It’s still a beautiful little bird anyway. And there are still so many evening grosbeaks around. Their numbers had gone down a bit for a few days, but they are now back up to around 80 birds. I haven’t had this many evening grosbeaks at my feeder for about 15 years. It’s great! And I’m getting some great pictures of them too. The first white-throated sparrow showed up on Friday, yesterday there was about 2 dozen of them, even more this morning. And both varieties are here now too. There is the bright black and white striped variety and the kind of dusky looking striped variety.

At one time it was thought the dusky variety were the females, but now they know that there are males and females in both varieties and they will often breed together, so they are one species. Jasper wasn’t been too cooperative this morning and kept going to the bird’s feeder instead of his own. So I had to go out and talk to him about that, finally after the third time he listened to me and went to his feeder so the birds could come back down again. The third time I went out I spotted a different bird in the birch tree. It was a gray catbird! That’s early, they don’t usually come back until mid May.

They are basically a solid gray bird with a black cap on top of their head. And they mew like a cat, very cat like actually. They can also mimic other bird songs very well. They are in the same family as mockingbirds. There is a pair of them that nest close by every year but I have yet to get a picture of one. I missed this morning too, he just didn’t stay in the tree long enough for me to get focused in on him. But hopefully this one will stay around, it would be a good time to get a picture since there are no leaves out yet. Normally when they come back the leaves are out, and they like to stay hidden. So, maybe this year I will get a picture. I hope you have a wonderful spring Sunday and God bless!

Steve and Muffin.

©2021 Steve McLeod.