After several gray, chilly, rainy days, today was clear, sunny, and cool \u2013 though not cold. As usual in this busy holiday season, it was late in the day before I got outside for a walk, near sunset, and birds seemed scarce and quiet.<\/p>\n
Then I began hearing Robins, Grackles and other Blackbirds, and came up over a hill and found a large flock of birds spread across the grass beneath pecan trees in several yards. Among them were a few Common Grackles, American Robins and European Starlings, but by far most of the birds were Rusty Blackbirds. There were many more birds in this flock than in the one I saw about a month ago, at least 300 Rusty Blackbirds, a conservative estimate.<\/p>\n
Many of the Rusty Blackbirds were eating pecans \u2013 probably most of them were \u2013 and all were very active, moving around a lot, so the scene was lively and felt like a party, with a festive, busy and slightly frenzied mood. I watched several Rusty Blackbirds carrying what appeared to be whole pecans in their bills, running with them across the grass to escape competing birds. This has been a good year for pecans here, so there are plenty on the ground in many yards. Maybe the abundance was a cause for a kind of celebration \u2013 or at least an enthusiastic gathering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After several gray, chilly, rainy days, today was clear, sunny, and cool \u2013 though not cold. As usual in this busy holiday season, it was late in the day before I got outside for a walk, near sunset, and birds seemed scarce and quiet. Then I began hearing Robins, Grackles and other Blackbirds, and came […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1525"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1525"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1528,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1525\/revisions\/1528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}