I saw today the birds enjoy the puddle where my sump runs out. A natural spring in their eyes.
I took a 9 by 12 perforated plastic tray,, hot glue tacked window screen on the bottom,voila, an open tray feeder that won't get a puddle.

Stopped by the duck pond near the bosque yesterday. Regular gang, nothing exotic, but a new prohibition against feeding them...hurray! The water is a lot cleaner now that idiots aren't throwing in loaves of bread.

The usual suspects


Duck!


Crossbreed?


Always fun to spot a wood duck


Recently learned that a coot isn't a duck and doesn't have webbed feet.


Knob head


Knob head mooning me

Hey, you found the secret to getting your ducks in a row!
That duck could be saying to the coot 'what's up with your feet, dude?'

Aww love ducks. Great pics.
I had American Pekin and American Rouen ducks for many years. They are great bug eliminators in the garden. And super aggressive watch dogs.

I found this year's thread! Lots of great pics. Love the ducks and hope people pay attention to the "don't feed them" sign.

I'm trying to ID a recent hawk visitor. Sorry for the blurry photo -- usually if I get 6 pics on auto settings, at least one is in focus, but not this time. Similar body shape to our pair of red-tailed hawks, but significantly smaller in size. Tail too short (and not quite small enough if memory serves) to be a Cooper's. I'm thinking sharp-shinned hawk?



I've seen him take sparrows off the deick a couple of times. (Hope they were HOSP!) I have a millet feeder in a non-sheltered location at the edge of the deck that attracts more house sparrows than anything else. I call it the hawk feeder.

I've been refilling feeders twice a week lately! Ordered more of everything, including ingredients for a batch of PB suet that I'll try to make today.

critterologist said:I call it the hawk feeder.

Good catch even spotting it in the trees. I think you're right about it being a sharp-shinned hawk. This photo from the Illinois Dept of Natural Resources shows the same barred rust-colored chest feathers as yours does.

Looks like a cooper's to me. A sharp shinned has more of a defined gray line down the side of the head whereas a cooper's doesn't.

Sharp shinned v. coopers

I thought cooper's matched well, with those grey wings.

I thought cooper's matched well, with those grey wings.
https://nestwatch.org/connect/...

Another way to tell, if you can see the tail (hehe) is the sharp shinned has a blunt tail whereas the coopers' is rounded.

let me see if one of the shots shows his tail better... there may be
stripes on the underside that just weren't registering with me at the time... can't say for sure about blunt/rounded end of tail, but that's a good field mark. Hopefully he'll return and I can get a better shot and a clearer ID!

I looked up both on the Cornell bird site, and I may have gotten the two descriptions mixed... Sharp-shinned hawks are smaller than Cooper's and have longer tails, and I thought it was the other way around.

One year we saw both of these hawks regularly (along with our red-tailed hawks), and I learned to ID them, but I think that was maybe 15 years ago, and my memory is a bit like swiss-cheese these days.

I think coopers are also more likely to hunt small birds.

We had one that took out a couple juvenile doves one year. I figured they wouldn't make it to adulthood because they'd see you and just walk right past you. The neighbor had someone working on their house and he asked if they were our pets because they were so unafraid of people.

Pretty sure both prey on birds.

Yes, Cooper's get the big ones, doves, jays, mockingbirds and Sharp-shinned get the smaller ones, sparrows, finches, bushtits. The male Cooper's are smaller and get more finches and sparrows than the females.
They're the reason we don't feed anything other than hummers. A pair of Cooper's have a nest a couple of streets over and used our backyard as a restaurant to feed their chicks. SWMBO couldn't stand the sounds and images.😱

I'm sure I cannot tell between Coopers and sharpshinned except by size.

And distinguishing by size with raptors is complicated, since I think females are usually 30% larger than males. I could have a female Sharp-shinned or a male Cooper's.

It seems to be difficult for them to stoop on feeders that are right up by the house (8-20" from the window). We'd definitely hear them if they tried! The "hawk feeder" (filled with millet and mostly utilized by house sparrows) and the squirrel feeder (hanging just above the outer deck railing) are more out in the open. To me, losing an occasional HOSP or squirrel is actually a good thing.

But when She Who Must Be Obeyed speaks, you take action!

I'm enjoying this discussion, but have you noticed that you're jumping back and forth between the 2023 and 2024 threads? Too confusing for this aged brain! Is it possible to lock last year's thread?

I think Jill realized that after someone mentioned the new 2024 thread, but she ended up going back to the old one since others were replying to that thread. I think some others have yet to come to the 2024 thread.

These lil birds are all fluffed out to stay warm….