Boolie’s Blog

I had been at Ridgefield for hours hoping to get some good pictures of the common yellowthroats that were migrating through but hadn’t been successful. I was getting ready to leave when this male goldfinch and a female flew into the cattails beside the car.

I only had time for a few quick pictures of the male before a territorial red-winged blackbird flew in to chase off the intruders. Happy to get a look at the golfinches that had returned for the spring, I decided to stick around a while longer and was finally rewarded with some nice looks at a male yellowthroat as well.

Savannah sparrows like to sing from a high point in the meadow, but high is a relative term. On a day when the grass is low, this blackberry stalk was sufficient, even though the stalk was itself less than a foot above the ground.

The stork might seem a strange choice to deliver babies in American folklore, as America’s only stork is the wood stork and it is not only carnivorous but also not exactly our most beautiful bird.

However, the tradition started not in America but in Europe, where the white stork often nested on farmhouses in spring when new life was emerging. The white stork has a feathered head and lacks the prehistoric look of our storks.

This adult was part of a group that was feeding in a freshwater marsh just before sunrise at Huntington Beach State Park in South Carolina. Younger birds have feathers on their necks and back of the head but are still unmistakably storks.

This picture is from my visit to Ridgefield a couple of weeks ago. The savannah sparrows were out singing in force and I came away with a couple of nice pictures.

I haven’t seen them much the past couple of weeks, but I’ve spent most of my time next to a marsh where you’ll see song sparrows and marsh wrens but not savannah sparrows. As their name implies, they hang out in the meadows, singing from any vantage point they can find, even if it’s only a blackberry vine that’s a few inches off the ground.

This bird was singing from much higher up in some tall grasses at the border between a meadow and a lake. It really threw its had back at the end of the song, but I like this shot where you can still see its eyes.

Last week wasn’t all about blackbirds of course. While sitting still and watching that corner of the marsh, a number of other birds flitted through. This song sparrow would occasionally pop up and break out in song.

Song sparrows are found across the continental United States and parts of Canada and Mexico. However, there is considerable variation in the colors of the various races in different geographies. This singer is typical of those found here in the Northwest, with a lot of white in the chest but the rest of the body a mix of browns and grays.

Despite being an unremarkable Little Brown Bird in appearance, it’s their singing that makes me look forward to seeing and hearing these common little sparrows.