A great report. Your backyard is busy with birds!

Apart from some volunteering on a local Curlew project and brief runs to the store, I’ve stayed home during these COVID-19 times …  lots of yard work and a real appreciation for yard birds. I really miss the social part of birding; sharing the enthusiasm and passion for birds so I thought I would share my morning yard birds in the Boise foothills.

…. Cold start but house finches and gold finches are super busy  and the constant, repetitive song of robins are everywhere; their squabbles too as they fight and chase each other and scream.  A House Wren pokes its head out of a current thicket … welcome back! The Say’s Phoebe is singing … same every morning without fail since I returned home three weeks ago.  “Sip”. Nice, a Chipping Sparrow, the first of four that passes through the yard in the next hour. A stunning male Audubon’s Warbler flycatching from a cottonwood … it’s bright yellow skullcap makes me think back to very different Warblers in Israel only three weeks ago….  A brief trill and an Orange crowned warbler moves into the next tree. With the sun comes the Ruby- crowned kinglets and that crazy downward haphazard spiralling song .. and the raptors. Above the lazy group of turkey vultures are smaller red tails, thernalling more tightly ..  and above them a tiny male sharpie. A male harrier is doing a loop-d-loop display, maybe trying to grab the attention of two birds migrating over so high they are just tiny specks. Up in the blue are mixed flocks of swallows … and now most have moved on again and we are left with a few locals around the cliffs.

Almost 50 species or so, some seedlings transplanted, and some firewood cut.  Happy yard birding.

Steve Dougill, Boise, ID