The Carolina Wren

This small wren of the eastern parts of the United States and eastern parts of Mexico is very noisy for its size. Its loud “tea-kettle tea-kettle” song lights up forests during the breeding season. They are hard to see because they favor brush thickets, but hearing them is not a problem when they are singing.

Photographed at El Franco Lee Park, Houston, Texas.

Green-tailed Towhee Sketch

This is the third year in a row we have found Green-tailed Towhees among the flowering manzanita shrubs in the Sierras. I love the various greens and the way the orange cap of the towhee mirrors the orange in the manzanita branches.

Towhee and manzanita sketch 2019

Towhee and manzanita sketch 2019

The Green-tailed Towhee

A strange looking bird indeed. In the summer this species is common in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range of California. It prefers relatively dry shrubby mountain slopes. Early in the breeding season they can be located by their unique song.

Cooper's Hawk

This hawk is a sleek, rapid-flying bird that negotiates tree limbs at high speed when chasing its prey. One of its favorite prey is the Mourning Dove. Our backyard feeders attract Mourning Doves, so this means that this raptor is on the prowl.

When the backyard birds spot this raptor, they are gone in the blink of an eye. One second there are 2-3 dozen birds on the ground and at the feeders and an eye blink later there are zero birds. When this happens, I know this species is nearby.

Whiskered Screech Owl

The Whiskered Screech Owl is found over a small area of the Southwest United States. Its distribution extends down the western mountains of Mexico and into part of Central America. We heard several “tooting” during the night where we were staying in Portal, Arizona. Sometimes their toots sound like Morse code.

Five-striped Sparrow Sketch

May 14 - Box Canyon Arizona

May 14 - Box Canyon Arizona

These were not shy and even came out and posed for us. I loved that there were a pair foraging together, and I was also taken by the beautiful coloration, with a gray head grading into a brown body.

The Five-striped Sparrow

Floy and I accompanied Ryan Phillips on a birding expedition into Southeastern Arizona. This area is known for some of the most unusual birds in the United States. The reason for these unique birds is that some of the mountains of Southern Arizona are contiguous with mountain ranges in Mexico. This enables some Neotropical birds to “hop” over the border and make themselves at home in Arizona.

The Five-striped Sparrow is a case in point because its distribution is mainly in Mexico over a strip that is about 450 miles long and less than 100 miles wide and extends from a few miles into Arizona and down the western mountain range of Mexico. This species barely makes it into Arizona and six were found about 32 miles north of the Mexican border, a few miles south of Tucson in a dry canyon. To the best of my knowledge this is as far north as they are known to occur. More details of this species can be found at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Neotropical Bird website.

Blackpoll Warbler

Blackpoll Warbler

Talk about an athlete, this warbler, which weighs less than half of an ounce, makes an 1800 mile non-stop flight over the Atlantic Ocean to get to its breeding grounds which are in far northern Canada and west to Alaska.

Tennessee Warblers

Tennessee Warbler sketch - 2019

Tennessee Warbler sketch - 2019

Tennessee Warblers were some of the drabber warblers we saw on our recent Texas trip but they were also the most abundant. This is a quick sketch where I tried to show these little birds in motion and partially hidden by leaves.

Scissor-tailed Flycatcher

Scissor-tailed Flycatcher

A truly beautiful flycatcher. The salmon-colored flanks are characteristic of this species. When it flies, the long tail reminds me of a train on a bridal dress. The area around the “armpit” or “wing pit” as it is sometimes called is a more intense redder salmon color.

This species breeds in the south-central U.S. and winters from South Mexico down into Panama.

Lazuli Bunting

Lazuli Bunting

One of my favorite summer Western California birds. It spends its winter in Western Mexico and stays with us in the summer in the higher elevations of the coastal mountains.

The striking blue color of this bird in otherwise green and yellow fields is real eye candy.

Spoonbills and warblers

spoonbill and warbler sketch

spoonbill and warbler sketch

Our recent trip to Texas was mostly about migrating warblers, but it was also interesting to see all the wading birds- herons, egrets, ibises and spoonbills. I particularly liked these tall birds perched awkwardly in branches out of the water.

Chuck-will's-widow

Chuck-will’s-widow. the largest nightjar in North America

We spent 9 days in Texas starting on April 20, 2019. The purpose of the trip was to experience the landfall of some of the billions of migratory birds that have crossed long distances over the Gulf of Mexico to reach North America. Many of these birds will make their way into northern Canada.

This bird was an unexpected find. We heard it was at Boy Scout Woods in High Island, Texas on our last day. I asked one of the volunteers at the entrance if she knew where I could find this bird. She did better than that and got up and said, follow me! My lucky day because trying to find one of these in dense forest on your own is nearly impossible because of this birds’ wonderful camouflage.

K is for Kestrel

‘K is for Kestrel’ 8” x 8” acrylic on wood panel

‘K is for Kestrel’ 8” x 8” acrylic on wood panel

‘K is for Kestrel’ is part of ‘Alphabet Soup - art inspired by letters of the alphabet’
May 2nd - 20th, 2019, at Studio Gallery,1641 Pacific Ave., San Francisco, CA.