A New Day – 60 – Chipping Sparrow
As you may know by now this year I’m trying to get back on the birding track a little more. This means I’ve been paying more attention to what birds are actually visiting my yard. As I said in a previous post – Day 57 - I didn’t think for a while that I had much more than House Sparrows. My neighbors have half dozen bird houses along the side of their garage by my fence that are all inhabited by these little guys; they seem to dominate. I have one of this feeders that sits under a sort of helmet if you will and the “bar” that the birds sit on to feed drops down and covers the food when something heavy lands on it. Birds can only feed from this one side & the whole point of its construction is to deter squirrels, which works well enough, but it also doesn’t encourage many other birds to stop by. So I got another one of those cheap plastic hexagonal feeders and hung it from a pole that I have attached to the pole the other one is on (the brand has “extra branches” that sort of snap onto the pole and stick out horizontally). With this feeder the birds can feed all around.it. Within a couple of days Blue Jays were visiting more, as well as Cardinals (instead of just eating off the ground) but my greatest increase was in rather common birds that weren’t so common to my feeder: White-breasted Nuthatches & Black-capped Chickadees.
As you an see, and if you didn’t already know, one good way to attract more birds and more variety is to offer different types of feeders. This year I plan as well to set up a different station in addition to this, that way the House Sparrows can dominate around their “houses” as much as they want plus the more shy birds will be a little farther from the house. This will also enable me to use different kinds of food, which will affect the variety. That’s another thing I did with this new feeder, I added dried mealworms to the feed mix and threw some handfuls around the area. There were some fans no doubt, one being the Nuthatch.
So far this year at my feeder and the surrounding area I’ve seen: Cardinals, Blue Jays, Black-capped Chickadees, White-breasted Nuthatches, Brown-headed Cowbirds, Mourning Doves, Gold Finches (Yeah, I didn’t think they came over my way as I haven’t seen much of them in the yard!), & today the Chipping Sparrow. I was so excited about this brown little bird with the rusty cap (often confused with the American Tree Sparrow and Field Sparrow), I knew it was something I hadn’t actually identified before. So I snapped a few pics before it took off and ran inside to my guide. After identifying it over the other Field Sparrow because of the extra color bar (that’s what I’m calling it) I happily rested back and said “Check, Chipping Sparrow”. So now I want to figure out what to plant to attract more birds and how to put my 2nd feeding station together.
(Sorry it’s pretty blurry, I was in a hurry and couldn’t get too close before it took off, so I’m going with what image I have that shows its markings best.)
My first officially identified Chipping Sparrow in my backyard.
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