I set up my camera today to try to take some pictures of birds at the bird feeder. Of course I didn’t see any even after waiting around for 10 or 15 minutes. I left the camera there and did some other stuff until I noticed the cat sitting on here window perch looking at the bird feeders with her tail swishing… good cat. Normally I don’t see the birds she’s looking at until she drops their corpses at my feet. I do feel kind of conflicted about that… while I enjoy watching birds, I also enjoy having a cat that is a mighty hunter.
Whelp… I was able to shoot some birds… with my camera. Here’s the first one, and it’s a good example of my problem with bird identification.
Even with high resolution pictures and two bird identification books, more often then not, I am completely incapable of determining what kind of bird it is. The two books I have are Birds Of Pennsylvania Field Guide and A Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America which Kari got as a gift when she went to see The Martha Stewart Show… that’s a pretty weak gift compared to some of the other stuff given away on that show.
I looked through the Birds of Pennsylvania book and didn’t see anything similar. I think I found it in the other book. My best guess is that it’s a Chipping Sparrow. Which I then found in the Birds of Pennsylvania book… somehow I had missed it. Here’s a picture from Wikipedia.
I guess it could be, but I’m not convinced. Man! That Wikipedia picture is tack sharp, way better than my picture. The more I look at it, the less I think it is a Chipping Sparrow. I think the one I photographed is too small. I keep going back-and-forth because the one in the Birds of PA book looks pretty close to my photograph. It would be nice if the Wikipedia photo wasn’t of a bird with an Elvis hair cut. Come on!
The next bird, I’m fairly certain of… or as certain as I can be about a bird that isn’t a Cardinal or a Blue Jay. I think it’s a House Finch. We’ve been calling them Purple Finches, but after consulting the two books, those have way more red covering their bodies. Then again, it could just be that they aren’t as red during the winter and haven’t gotten their full color yet… or they could be a juvenile which also affects how they look.
Yeesh! That bird feeder is pretty ratty looking. I think I need to replace it. And here we have what a House Finch really looks like.
That could be a match. It’s a little scruffier looking, but according to the image information, it was taken in California and you know how people in California are.
OK. One last bird. I think this little fellow is a Dark-eyed Junco. I’ll let you be the judge.
I need to take some pictures from somewhere other than my kitchen window.
Here is the entire set.
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Courtesy of LifeHacker, here’s a cool application called ToneShop for creating cell phone ring tones easily from several types of audio files. In the past I’ve used Audacity. I’ll give ToneShop a try and report back later.
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