well i like blue jays because blue animals are rare but their call is the worst. cardinals are pretty cool, but i gotta go with the backyard chickens next door because they share the eggs
@thismyusername ravens and crows rock.corvids as a whole are incredibly smart and Tool users and remember people and they teach and domesticate other animals they are just rocking birds and they’re my spirit animal. They’re found in so many indigenous religions throughout the world not just Native American as most people here might think but Norse the British Isles Etc they just serve wonderful purposes and I firmly recommend embracing them
@Cerridwyn@thismyusername I heartily agree! I’m especially partial to ravens & always thought it would be cool to visit the ones that live at the Tower of London. Talk about OG bawses! They sure do have life figured out.
@brennyn grackles are a real problem here, they congratulate in huge flocks in the winter!
I believe that from time to time the city tries to eradicate them with limited success.
They seen like smaller flocks for a few years, then it’s full on “BIRDS” again!
@brennyn@lonocat They are also sound mimics with an even greater range of expression than mockingbirds. Here in Houston, around the medical center and the universities, we tend to have them faithfully reproducing the entire sequence of blats and whoops and other sounds from car alarms. It’s really strange to walk out into a parking lot and have an alarm going off in the top of a tree.
There’s a hedge of lilacs and plum trees between my yard and my neighbors to the west. Today I saw rosy finches, a blue jay, and some spotted towhees all hanging out there at the same time!
What’s funny is that I can only see them from a bathroom window.
I have NEVER seen a cardinal.
@Kyeh
It’s said that “cardinal appear when angels are near” and since you’ve NEVER seen a cardinal I feel that you’ve missed out on the whole experience. (Well, I guess ONLY if you believe in that kind of thing. ) So do you have another bird in your area that has a similar meaning?
Northern cardinals are commonly spotted across the eastern half of the United States, and also show up as far west as Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, and in Mexico.
But I’m pretty fond of most birds so I’m pretty happy to see the ones we do have. I could do without the magpies …
Oh, and in that hedge today there was also a chickadee!
@Kyeh Lol… I guess I took that comment a little too literally. Duh! I did find that weird that you never had seen a cardinal… should’ve known you meant living in the hedge. I’d looked up the towhees not knowing that one. I just saw my first cat bird a couple years ago. Birds are great!
I’m partial to robins due to my childhood adopted “feather baby.” I raised him, taught him everything he knew, including, eventually, how to fly away. Does he call? Does he write?
@Kyeh The robins & the cardinals must have decided to summer on the East coast this year, we don’t seem to have a shortage of either of them. Cardinals have always overwintered here, but in recent years, more & more robins are staying, too. One small silver lining to global warming, i guess.
@ircon96@Kyeh Robins are OK, except when they raid our blueberry bushes. (But this year we thwarted them by putting a frame with netting over the bushes!)
@Kidsandliz@Kyeh@macromeh Can you blame them? Blueberries are yummy! I just wish i could convince some critters to take a liking to the Concord grapes my late husband decided to curse me with when he planted a couple of them years ago. Those things can’t be killed & take over everything, eventually. They’ll find my corpse encased in a thicket of vines someday…
@ircon96@Kyeh@macromeh Oh grapes can be killed. My uncle, taking out the grapes with roundup killed most of the blackberries at the farm as well. We about killed him over the blackberries.
@Kidsandliz@Kyeh@macromeh@werehatrack I agree about the blackberries, that was uncalled for! Lol… But were they Concord grapes? I read that they’re not as sensitive to glyphosate as most other varieties, so the main stems have to be cut to the ground, then painted with concentrated herbicide, and any runners along the ground have to be handled the same way, separately, at each attachment point. Ugh.
@callow@PhysAssist They’re another of my favorites; the amazing little guys are surprisingly fierce! When i was younger, I never knew they migrated such huge distances, especially considering their size, to get up here to New England. It gives me even more of an appreciation for them.
Common birds here, I like mockingbirds. They are great entertainers with their calls. I once raised one that had fallen out of its nest onto my yard, around some ant mounds. Tried putting it back into the tree there, but it wouldn’t stay and parents never showed. I fed it fishing worms and showed it to eat and then catch grasshoppers in the yard. Once it was older and I released it, it would come back to me whenever I was in the yard (for several weeks). Thomas Jefferson is said to have kept them.
More unusual (at least around here), I like cedar waxwings. They are quite striking when they show up in numbers. They look like they were designed by an artist. I once was roofing and noticed a flock of the in a tree a few yards away.
And I have a fondness for hummingbirds, but rarely see them anymore. I once found one that trapped itself inside my screened-in back porch. I caught in in a towel and released it.
My outdoor cats seem to have a fondness for all birds, judging by the feathers I see on the ground around my house.
We have an abundance of lesser goldfinches along with chickadees, house finches, scrub jays, acorn woodpeckers, anna’s hummingbirds, bushtits and mourning doves. We also get European starlings. They used to be my favorite because my parents would give me a dime for every one I could shoot. Cowbirds too.
These days I like the acorn woodpeckers and the nuthatch. He just showed up last weekend for the first time.
It’s the hummingbirds for me! I’m fascinated by their size and I love watching them at the feeders! I’ve been wanting to get one of those hand held feeders or ring feeders. They already fly right up on us like we’re not even there so feeding from our hands should be easy!
When I was a kid in the Ozarks, we always had whip-poor-wills and purple martins.
Now in West Texas, we see robins and an occasional bluejay. The grackles are just a nuisance, loud and messy. There’s also some doves, and once we had a redtailed hawk that hung out for a few days. Hawks are majestic and a little bit scary.
We had robins building nests each year over the front door. You’d get dive bombed if you went in and out that door.
Once, years ago and a different set of cats I woke up to a cardinal and bluejay fighting over who owned the flowering tree in my backyard that had branches overhanging the back porch. It was summer. My window was open (had a screen in it). My then 2 cats got in the window sill to watch the action. All of a sudden the cardinal dive bombed the window, veering at the last second. The two cats fled, bellies and tails to the ground, running under the bed.
Shortly there after the blue bird left and the cardinal, after briefly surveying the tree, flew to the neighbor’s telephone wire and hung out there. Dumb ass had fought for and won the tree then didn’t stay.
@Kidsandliz Sounds like cardinals are just super aggressively territorial; kind of like the squawky magpies around here. I’ve seen magpies fighting with squirrels or cats - not physically, but being loud and screechy.
@Kidsandliz@Kyeh Another surprising thing i recently learned about hummingbirds is how aggressively territorial they are; they’re fierce little warriors. My former neighbor used to put out a bunch of feeders around her deck and, in between eating, they’d chase each other all over the yard. The birds that are really territorial don’t seem to concentrate on one tree or bush, it’s a whole area that they defend, so that’s probably what happened with your cardinal. You’ve gotta admire their tenacity!
@ircon96@Kidsandliz@Kyeh I was relaxing on my back deck when I noticed a humming bird hovering around some crocosmia in the yard. As I watched, it would repeatedly hover ~20 feet over the flowers for a few seconds, then swoop down to them and immediately pop right back up to hover again. I watched this odd behavior for a minute or so before I realized that there were actually two humming birds - one would feast on the flowers while the other hovered above plotting his attack. Then the hovering one would swoop down, chasing away the one feeding as they swapped places. Repeat, over and over.
Silly birds must use nearly as much energy fighting each other than they could gain from feeding on the flowers. But amusing to watch.
@Kyeh They say magpies can learn to speak, so maybe you should sit out with them occasionally & have a chat! Or maybe they’d settle down if you built them a puzzle/obstacle course to distract them…? I wondered why i had never seen one around here & found out they’re only out there, west of the Rockies, & cardinals are only here in the east. I’m sure you’d trade in a heartbeat if we could! Lol
@ircon96 Yea, I’d happily trade some magpies for cardinals. Magpies are pretty; I worked at the campus bookstore in college and a man came in asking what those gorgeous birds out there were. We told him magpies but he wouldn’t believe us!
@Kyeh Yes, they are beautiful. I’m not sure why, but always pictured them being all black, more like a raven. Black & white animals are always striking.
@xenophod I Don’t know if the Australian version does the same thing, but North American magpies lay their eggs in other species’ nests. They get other birds to do the job of raising their young for them. And they typically do it in nests of birds that are much smaller than them, so that their young crowd out the rest of the nestlings.
@Kyeh@sicc574 Oh, no, that makes me sad! Lol… I love mourning doves, i find them very relaxing, the way they stroll around, bobbing their heads, cleaning up the mess on the ground left by all the crazed birds at the feeders. They’re so chill & zen by comparison.
@ircon96@Kyeh@sicc574 Mourning doves are also the dead-easiest ones to raise to maturity in a hurry if you find a nest-fall. Two weeks from just hatched to fledged and flying, close to adult size, and demanding to get out. That’s on a diet of Gerber mixed grains infant cereal, fed using a modified pipette. They can eat more than their own weight in food per day, during the early days. It doesn’t seem possible, but we never lost one with that regime.
I came to the comments in hopes of bird jokes like “the big breasted jiggle whopper” or “the v6 thunderbird T top,” but so far it’s just people talking about actual birds and I am disappointed.
Turkey vultures.
I get them hanging out and even roosting by the multiple dozens, some times even as much as around a hundred in my back yard. They’re pretty, they’re ominous, and they leave dog turd sized shits on my annoying neighbor’s cars.
@Catburd I called the city to report a dead possum to pick up about a year ago. By the time that the truck showed up to collect the carcass, it had been pretty much stripped of all the soft bits. Black vultures. I joked that the city had contracted out the carcass disposal to a bunch of birdbrains.
I do like to see a cardinal break up the monotony of sparrows, ravens, and pigeons up here in my corridor, but I also miss seeing clusters of traveling warblers in breeding plumage (blue yellow white) from my youth – last seen nearly four decades ago.
I’m trying to get the crows to take peanuts out of my hand.
Years, I tell you. I’ve been working on this for years!
These past few weeks, a few of them actually hang around when I put the peanuts out. They don’t fly off. Or if they do, it’s on top of the car or truck and they watch me with great interest.
The only member of the parrot family that was native to the area that is now the Continental US in the past 200 years was the Carolina Parakeet, believed extinct for 84 years at this point. All others are escaped exotics that have bred colonies. There is a project underway to reintroduce the Carolina parakeet using genetic material from preserved samples. I have no hard info about its progress.
@Kyeh@lisaviolet There was a colony of some kind of parrot in our neighborhood, But I have not heard their squawks this year; the freeze last winter may have done them in, or they may have moved to a location with a warmer large transformer on a suitable pole. (Monk parrots have been known to build huge colonies around those in NYC.)
@capnjb@chienfou And chickens don’t generally step on your foot and break it when they’re not happy. (They’re nasty little creeps otherwise, though. TASTY nasty little creeps. The latter factor makes it much easier to appreciate the former.)
@capnjb@werehatrack
OTOH I did get spurred by a rooster bad enough to make me update my tetanus shot. (Damn bastard poked a hole the size of my little finger in my calf)
@capnjb@chienfou@werehatrack Roosters can be real assholes.
I was once walking across our chicken yard and a rooster came up behind me and tried to spur my leg. I spun around with a side kick worthy of Jackie Chan, but just grazed his head. I was wearing my heavy work boots and if it had fully connected, he would be toast. As it was, he was shaking his head with drops of blood flying off.
But he never attacked me again.
@capnjb@chienfou@Kyeh@macromeh@pakopako@rockblossom The analysis was of the similarlity of a single type of identifiable biological material, but no DNA was recovered, so no direct comparison was possible. Maybe someday…
Peregrine Falcon.
@yakkoTDI Red-tailed Hawk
@yakkoTDI Although, given the bald eagle I saw on the way home last week, maybe soon, they’ll be my favorites…
@PhysAssist @yakkoTDI Ever eat at Brody’s on the Bay? You can often see them flying over the water.
I use to like robins but our yard has a strict no landing zone due to the cats. Even the turkeys dont visit anymore.
well i like blue jays because blue animals are rare but their call is the worst. cardinals are pretty cool, but i gotta go with the backyard chickens next door because they share the eggs
Beware the golf finch! It will go for your balls.
Golf finch? Is that what they mean when they say “birdie”?
@ircon96
/image redwing blackbird
Reminds me of my childhood
@ybmuG I especially like this ballsy dude!
@ircon96 @ybmuG Looks like everyone is doing Uber to get by.
@yakkoTDI @ybmuG
(Ok, ok, no need for the hook, l’ll show myself out!)
Altho, since he’s got wings, i probably would have gone with Lyft.
/image backyard bird
We get quail.
The tiny little babies running across the yard are really cute. They look like those giant marshmallows.
@xobzoo Wow! Very few quail around here these days.
The crows will remember being snubbed.
@thismyusername So true! “Your ass is mine,” quoth the raven.
@thismyusername ravens and crows rock.corvids as a whole are incredibly smart and Tool users and remember people and they teach and domesticate other animals they are just rocking birds and they’re my spirit animal. They’re found in so many indigenous religions throughout the world not just Native American as most people here might think but Norse the British Isles Etc they just serve wonderful purposes and I firmly recommend embracing them
@Cerridwyn @thismyusername I heartily agree! I’m especially partial to ravens & always thought it would be cool to visit the ones that live at the Tower of London. Talk about OG bawses!
They sure do have life figured out.
Grackles. They have cool iridescent feathers and stare at you like YO I’M A GRACKLE!
@brennyn grackles are a real problem here, they congratulate in huge flocks in the winter!
I believe that from time to time the city tries to eradicate them with limited success.
They seen like smaller flocks for a few years, then it’s full on “BIRDS” again!
@brennyn @lonocat They are also sound mimics with an even greater range of expression than mockingbirds. Here in Houston, around the medical center and the universities, we tend to have them faithfully reproducing the entire sequence of blats and whoops and other sounds from car alarms. It’s really strange to walk out into a parking lot and have an alarm going off in the top of a tree.
Carolina wren. They’re loud.
There’s a hedge of lilacs and plum trees between my yard and my neighbors to the west. Today I saw rosy finches, a blue jay, and some spotted towhees all hanging out there at the same time!
What’s funny is that I can only see them from a bathroom window.
I have NEVER seen a cardinal.
@Kyeh
) So do you have another bird in your area that has a similar meaning? 
It’s said that “cardinal appear when angels are near” and since you’ve NEVER seen a cardinal I feel that you’ve missed out on the whole experience. (Well, I guess ONLY if you believe in that kind of thing.
@Lynnerizer
They just don’t live here!
But I’m pretty fond of most birds so I’m pretty happy to see the ones we do have. I could do without the magpies …
Oh, and in that hedge today there was also a chickadee!
@Kyeh Lol… I guess I took that comment a little too literally. Duh!
I did find that weird that you never had seen a cardinal… should’ve known you meant living in the hedge. 
I’d looked up the towhees not knowing that one. I just saw my first cat bird a couple years ago. Birds are great! 
@Lynnerizer I’ve never seen a cardinal anywhere - I just haven’t spent much time east of CO!
I’m partial to robins due to my childhood adopted “feather baby.” I raised him, taught him everything he knew, including, eventually, how to fly away. Does he call? Does he write?
@ircon96 For some reason I don’t think I’ve seen any robins this year! They seem to have been replaced by spotted towhees.
@Kyeh The robins & the cardinals must have decided to summer on the East coast this year, we don’t seem to have a shortage of either of them. Cardinals have always overwintered here, but in recent years, more & more robins are staying, too. One small silver lining to global warming, i guess.
@ircon96 @Kyeh Robins are OK, except when they raid our blueberry bushes. (But this year we thwarted them by putting a frame with netting over the bushes!)
@ircon96 @Kyeh @macromeh My aunt and uncle did that with their big mass of blueberry bushes as well. Nice to actually have blueberries after all.
@Kidsandliz @Kyeh @macromeh Can you blame them? Blueberries are yummy!
I just wish i could convince some critters to take a liking to the Concord grapes my late husband decided to curse me with when he planted a couple of them years ago. Those things can’t be killed & take over everything, eventually. They’ll find my corpse encased in a thicket of vines someday… 
@ircon96 @Kyeh @macromeh Oh grapes can be killed. My uncle, taking out the grapes with roundup killed most of the blackberries at the farm as well. We about killed him over the blackberries.
@ircon96 @Kidsandliz @Kyeh @macromeh Muscadines are similar in peoclivities and hardiness. I battle tw varieties here
@Kidsandliz @Kyeh @macromeh @werehatrack I agree about the blackberries, that was uncalled for! Lol… But were they Concord grapes? I read that they’re not as sensitive to glyphosate as most other varieties, so the main stems have to be cut to the ground, then painted with concentrated herbicide, and any runners along the ground have to be handled the same way, separately, at each attachment point. Ugh.
Yellow-bellied sapsucker
Hmmmm… Hummingbird
@hchavers Thank you for not saying, “hummers.” Your restraint is much appreciated!
Hummingbirds are my favorite too and the rarest. Love all the other birds too.
@callow We have tons coming to and fighting over our feeders. Love 'em.
@callow @PhysAssist They’re another of my favorites; the amazing little guys are surprisingly fierce! When i was younger, I never knew they migrated such huge distances, especially considering their size, to get up here to New England. It gives me even more of an appreciation for them.
Common birds here, I like mockingbirds. They are great entertainers with their calls. I once raised one that had fallen out of its nest onto my yard, around some ant mounds. Tried putting it back into the tree there, but it wouldn’t stay and parents never showed. I fed it fishing worms and showed it to eat and then catch grasshoppers in the yard. Once it was older and I released it, it would come back to me whenever I was in the yard (for several weeks). Thomas Jefferson is said to have kept them.
More unusual (at least around here), I like cedar waxwings. They are quite striking when they show up in numbers. They look like they were designed by an artist. I once was roofing and noticed a flock of the in a tree a few yards away.
And I have a fondness for hummingbirds, but rarely see them anymore. I once found one that trapped itself inside my screened-in back porch. I caught in in a towel and released it.
My outdoor cats seem to have a fondness for all birds, judging by the feathers I see on the ground around my house.
@phendrick Hummingbirds are smart…no wonder they hightailed it outta there!
@ircon96 @phendrick cedar waxwings are on my want to see list!
@callow Beware impostors! Be sure to authenticate them by the little red spot on the wings.
Supposedly that’s where the name comes from, because it looks like a spot of sealing wax.
The big hawks that used to hang out in my back yard. Though I did see a blue jay for the first time in a while a few days ago.
We have an abundance of lesser goldfinches along with chickadees, house finches, scrub jays, acorn woodpeckers, anna’s hummingbirds, bushtits and mourning doves. We also get European starlings. They used to be my favorite because my parents would give me a dime for every one I could shoot. Cowbirds too.
These days I like the acorn woodpeckers and the nuthatch. He just showed up last weekend for the first time.
It’s the hummingbirds for me! I’m fascinated by their size and I love watching them at the feeders! I’ve been wanting to get one of those hand held feeders or ring feeders. They already fly right up on us like we’re not even there so feeding from our hands should be easy!
When I was a kid in the Ozarks, we always had whip-poor-wills and purple martins.
Now in West Texas, we see robins and an occasional bluejay. The grackles are just a nuisance, loud and messy. There’s also some doves, and once we had a redtailed hawk that hung out for a few days. Hawks are majestic and a little bit scary.
@2many2no just like the white winged dove
Sings a song
Sounds like she’s singing
Oh oh oh
We had robins building nests each year over the front door. You’d get dive bombed if you went in and out that door.
Once, years ago and a different set of cats I woke up to a cardinal and bluejay fighting over who owned the flowering tree in my backyard that had branches overhanging the back porch. It was summer. My window was open (had a screen in it). My then 2 cats got in the window sill to watch the action. All of a sudden the cardinal dive bombed the window, veering at the last second. The two cats fled, bellies and tails to the ground, running under the bed.
Shortly there after the blue bird left and the cardinal, after briefly surveying the tree, flew to the neighbor’s telephone wire and hung out there. Dumb ass had fought for and won the tree then didn’t stay.
@Kidsandliz Sounds like cardinals are just super aggressively territorial; kind of like the squawky magpies around here. I’ve seen magpies fighting with squirrels or cats - not physically, but being loud and screechy.
@Kyeh Both bluebirds and cardinals are very territorial and aggressive. Generally blue birds “win” although in this case apparently not.
@Kidsandliz @Kyeh Another surprising thing i recently learned about hummingbirds is how aggressively territorial they are; they’re fierce little warriors. My former neighbor used to put out a bunch of feeders around her deck and, in between eating, they’d chase each other all over the yard. The birds that are really territorial don’t seem to concentrate on one tree or bush, it’s a whole area that they defend, so that’s probably what happened with your cardinal. You’ve gotta admire their tenacity!
@ircon96 @Kidsandliz @Kyeh I was relaxing on my back deck when I noticed a humming bird hovering around some crocosmia in the yard. As I watched, it would repeatedly hover ~20 feet over the flowers for a few seconds, then swoop down to them and immediately pop right back up to hover again. I watched this odd behavior for a minute or so before I realized that there were actually two humming birds - one would feast on the flowers while the other hovered above plotting his attack. Then the hovering one would swoop down, chasing away the one feeding as they swapped places. Repeat, over and over.
Silly birds must use nearly as much energy fighting each other than they could gain from feeding on the flowers. But amusing to watch.
Where I live, roadrunners.
@kittykat9180 just saw my first one in person today!
Orioles are my favorite. Their call is so unique.
Golf finch? Is that a sport that uses a Tee Gret?
And if I shoot some fowl but don’t hit them all with my first shot, but get the remainder with my second, is that a Spare row?
Oh, and I love to play wrennis with the racquet the blue jays make.
The Crimson rosella and the Kookaburra are some pretty cool backyard birds. Although, I miss the sound that Magpies make, even if they are evil.
@xenophod, crows are the most evil. They’re straight up assholes and they sound terrible. Really smart though with good memory.
@xenophod
@phendrick
@phendrick @xenophod Wow, Australian magpies sound WAAAY cooler than the ones around here! Ours just squawk like crows but louder.
@Kyeh They say magpies can learn to speak, so maybe you should sit out with them occasionally & have a chat!
Or maybe they’d settle down if you built them a puzzle/obstacle course to distract them…? I wondered why i had never seen one around here & found out they’re only out there, west of the Rockies, & cardinals are only here in the east. I’m sure you’d trade in a heartbeat if we could! Lol
@ircon96 Yea, I’d happily trade some magpies for cardinals. Magpies are pretty; I worked at the campus bookstore in college and a man came in asking what those gorgeous birds out there were. We told him magpies but he wouldn’t believe us!
@Kyeh Yes, they are beautiful. I’m not sure why, but always pictured them being all black, more like a raven. Black & white animals are always striking.
@ircon96 Toby appreciates that observation!
@xenophod I Don’t know if the Australian version does the same thing, but North American magpies lay their eggs in other species’ nests. They get other birds to do the job of raising their young for them. And they typically do it in nests of birds that are much smaller than them, so that their young crowd out the rest of the nestlings.
Harris hawks with an appetite for squirrels.
We get doves often but i can’t stand the way they sound. The bird that is a regular where I live that I admire most is the blue heron.
@sicc574 Doves - I also can’t stand that morose cooing! So repetitive and annoying, kind of like a dripping faucet.
@Kyeh @sicc574 Oh, no, that makes me sad! Lol… I love mourning doves, i find them very relaxing, the way they stroll around, bobbing their heads, cleaning up the mess on the ground left by all the crazed birds at the feeders. They’re so chill & zen by comparison.
@ircon96 @sicc574 I like the way they look but NOT the way they sound.
@sicc574 Herons are evil birb that kill our koi- even ones too big for them to eat…
@ircon96 @Kyeh @sicc574 Mourning doves are also the dead-easiest ones to raise to maturity in a hurry if you find a nest-fall. Two weeks from just hatched to fledged and flying, close to adult size, and demanding to get out. That’s on a diet of Gerber mixed grains infant cereal, fed using a modified pipette. They can eat more than their own weight in food per day, during the early days. It doesn’t seem possible, but we never lost one with that regime.
I came to the comments in hopes of bird jokes like “the big breasted jiggle whopper” or “the v6 thunderbird T top,” but so far it’s just people talking about actual birds and I am disappointed.
@Willijs3 I’ve got a couple of non-feathered birds for ya!
Hummingbirds, Mourning Doves, and Mockingbirds
@cbatte +1 on the hummingbirds
Ruby Throated Hummingbird and the California Quail
I love nuthatches because their sounds amuse me. They sound like dog chew toys
Yellow belly sap sucker
/image Woody woodpecker
Turkey vultures.
I get them hanging out and even roosting by the multiple dozens, some times even as much as around a hundred in my back yard. They’re pretty, they’re ominous, and they leave dog turd sized shits on my annoying neighbor’s cars.
@Catburd I called the city to report a dead possum to pick up about a year ago. By the time that the truck showed up to collect the carcass, it had been pretty much stripped of all the soft bits. Black vultures. I joked that the city had contracted out the carcass disposal to a bunch of birdbrains.
This is Mike. I like Mike. When he is around, we have a lot less squirrel issues. Be like Mike.
@capnjb I have Hootie, who cleans up squirrels, and leaves their tails for me to find.
I do like to see a cardinal break up the monotony of sparrows, ravens, and pigeons up here in my corridor, but I also miss seeing clusters of traveling warblers in breeding plumage (blue yellow white) from my youth – last seen nearly four decades ago.
Oh a picture; this thing:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/keithmwilliams/5159906479/in/pool-birdguide
I’m trying to get the crows to take peanuts out of my hand.
Years, I tell you. I’ve been working on this for years!
These past few weeks, a few of them actually hang around when I put the peanuts out. They don’t fly off. Or if they do, it’s on top of the car or truck and they watch me with great interest.
We have parrots, too, but meh.
@lisaviolet Parrots!! I think that’s pretty cool - but meh because they’re greedy and eat all the nuts, is that it?
@Kyeh They do eat all the nuts. Brian’s mom used to complain about their pecan trees and the parrots.
And they’re incredibly noisy, wake the dead noisy.
@lisaviolet Oh, yikes. Are they native to S. CA, or did they originate there from escaped pets?
The only member of the parrot family that was native to the area that is now the Continental US in the past 200 years was the Carolina Parakeet, believed extinct for 84 years at this point. All others are escaped exotics that have bred colonies. There is a project underway to reintroduce the Carolina parakeet using genetic material from preserved samples. I have no hard info about its progress.
@Kyeh https://www.10news.com/lifestyle/exploring-san-diego/how-the-wild-parrots-of-san-diego-arrived-in-americas-finest-city
@Kyeh @lisaviolet There was a colony of some kind of parrot in our neighborhood, But I have not heard their squawks this year; the freeze last winter may have done them in, or they may have moved to a location with a warmer large transformer on a suitable pole. (Monk parrots have been known to build huge colonies around those in NYC.)
Chickens
@chienfou Not gonna lie, I’ve got a co-worker with horses and chickens. FWIW, horses can’t poop breakfast.
@capnjb @chienfou And chickens don’t generally step on your foot and break it when they’re not happy. (They’re nasty little creeps otherwise, though. TASTY nasty little creeps. The latter factor makes it much easier to appreciate the former.)
@capnjb @werehatrack
OTOH I did get spurred by a rooster bad enough to make me update my tetanus shot. (Damn bastard poked a hole the size of my little finger in my calf)
@capnjb @chienfou @werehatrack Roosters can be real assholes.
I was once walking across our chicken yard and a rooster came up behind me and tried to spur my leg. I spun around with a side kick worthy of Jackie Chan, but just grazed his head. I was wearing my heavy work boots and if it had fully connected, he would be toast. As it was, he was shaking his head with drops of blood flying off.
But he never attacked me again.
@capnjb @chienfou @macromeh @werehatrack
Ostriches and barnyard chickens are the closest (known) living relatives of the T-Rex. That should come as no surprise to anyone who has raised either.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/t-rex-linked-to-chickens-ostriches-180940877/
So: if you went back in time and roasted a T-rex, would it taste like chicken?
@capnjb @chienfou @macromeh @rockblossom @werehatrack
Taste like chicken? Everything else does …
@capnjb @chienfou @Kyeh @macromeh @rockblossom @werehatrack Snakes, lizards, and frogs fall under the same line of evolution if I remember right.
@capnjb @chienfou @Kyeh @macromeh @pakopako @rockblossom The analysis was of the similarlity of a single type of identifiable biological material, but no DNA was recovered, so no direct comparison was possible. Maybe someday…
Sparrow