See Sit Spot Challenge at Kamana.org for more about the challenge.
Time of sit: 7:50pm-8:10pm
After spending most of the day out birding (and not getting any naps), I was pretty tired and had a hard time paying attention while sitting this evening. Some things that stand out in my memory:
The sounds of people playing basketball down on the courts near Crescent Harbor – in particular the low frequency ring of the ball hitting the rim, and the occasional vocalization that wasn’t intelligible (probably due in part to the distance).
A Song Sparrow sang down the hill to the southwest, and a Pacific Wren or two behind the house to the northeast.
A male Dark-eyed Junco visited the lilac bush feeders. Although I never saw another bird, it chirped for much of the time I observed it before it subsequently flew back towards the east behind the house. The chirps seemed somewhat uncharacteristically loud and/or strident to me, at least compared to other times I’ve noticed juncos communicating with each other. At the time, I wondered if the bird was chirping to express some frustration with the suet feeder it was attempting to get food from. There is just a small chunk of suet left in the cage feeder. Unlike the Chestnut-backed Chickadees that visited while I was watching the other night, the heavier more ground-feeding-adapted junco seemed to have difficulty hanging on to the wire cage long enough to easily peck at the food. It flew up to the feeder at least two or three times, but it was not clear to me how successful it was at getting any suet out. Reflecting back on the calls as I write, I came up with an alternative possibility – the chirps may have been contact calls, but louder than usual in order to stay in contact with a bird that was relatively far away (and presumably out of my earshot behind the house – at least I didn’t notice any second bird calling).