Birds, Birds and More Birds

Another nice day in SW Minnesota; nice if you like drizzle, which I do. We have planted so many new trees and hedges that I am grateful for the rain.

Today I was looking out my east window with a cup of tea, watching the drizzle and the birds at one of our feeding stations. And I remembered I wanted to tell you about our birds.

Anniversary Grove has 5 ½ acres, most of which is trees. So we get hundreds of birds. It helps that we have 2 feeding stations that we use year-round. Every year I keep a list of birds we have seen, and when they come in. Every year the list gets bigger. So we now have an idea of when some of the species will come in. This year the list is up to 39 different birds, so far.

We have the normal yearly residents like the goldfinch, the hairy and downy woodpeckers, both varieties of nuthatch and the black capped chickadees. The juncos come in the fall and leave around the middle of April to head north. We are in a migration flight path and see thousands of geese, swans and cranes going over our area starting in March. They do the return migration in late fall. We’ve seen the male cardinal twice, but cannot get him to stay. Hubby’s favorite visitor is what he calls “the yellow butts”. Yellow-rumped warblers come through in the middle of April and stay about a week. They are headed north too. The last visitors passing through came in last week, and are still here. The Lapland Longspur is a very pretty medium sized bird with a big appetite. They are supposed to be on their way to the arctic to breed. They’d better get going, or the short summer up there will pass them by.



Lapland Longspur. Sorry it’s fuzzy. He would not hold still.

The summer residents started with the robins coming in on March 7 this year. Then on the 5th of April, hundreds of them showed up. I have never seen so many birds of one variety together, ever. Hubby and I lost count of them. After about 2 weeks of eating everything they could find, most of the robins moved on. We still have about 20 breeding pairs left that will stay all summer. We get most of the varieties of blackbirds, from grackles to yellow-headed ones. Cedar waxwings came in the middle of March and I think they are still here, down in the grove. I can hear them, but not see them. And of course, my favorite, the mourning dove shows up April. We have a large variety of sparrows, some wrens, warblers and flycatchers. The elusive veery and brown thrasher stay in the bottom of the grove and are mostly heard, but not seen. The yellow bellied sapsucker, flicker and red bellied woodpecker have joined our other woodpeckers. We have one very confused male hairy woodpecker that thinks he’ll find a mate by tapping on sheet metal; ALL DAY! I think he’ll be very disappointed this year. The rose-breasted grosbeak showed up a couple of days ago and this morning we finally saw our pair of wood ducks.


Male Rose-breasted Grosbeak. More beautiful than this picture shows.

OK, OK….Hubby keeps asking me, “Did you tell them?” So I’ll tell you. The hummers are here. They came in 2 days ago. For someone that claims to not care about “those stinking birds”, he is always letting me know what he has seen. And he spends hours in the summer, watching the birds with me. He is so excited to see the hummingbirds show up. He’d been pestering me to put up the feeders, so I did on Wednesday morning. And within an hour I saw a male ruby-throated eating.

As excited as I was about the hummingbird, I got a bigger surprise about an hour ago. While trying to get a photo of the Lapland Longspur for you, an indigo bunting showed up at the feeder. They are the most beautiful blue bird. So now I have proof that they actually come here.


Indigo Bunting at the feeder.

We’re still waiting for a few late stragglers to show up. The Baltimore oriole, the orchard oriole and the sleek catbird should be here soon.

I hope this gives you an idea of the bird life here. I didn’t name all the species because this blog is getting really long. And yes, at times the noise is deafening. But most of the time it is like listening to a mystical choir sing.