Late this morning I heard the quick, complex little song of a Ruby-crowned Kinglet coming from the thickets around one corner at the end of our street. The briskly whistled and twittered song sounds exactly like what I might imagine for the tiny, spritely bird. Hearing the song surprised me a little \u2013 it may not be unusual for it to sing in the fall, but I don\u2019t remember noticing it often until the spring.<\/p>\n
A Pine Warbler also sang its looser, musical trill in the woods, maybe in response to the lovely, cool, sunny fall day. A Northern Flicker clung to the trunk of a pine, feeding on the berries of a vine. A small feeding flock of birds moved through the woods, Carolina Chickadee, Tufted Titmouse, Downy Woodpecker, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Carolina Wren, and Brown-headed Nuthatch, and I heard the nasal calls of a White-breasted Nuthatch in the distance. Yellow-rumped Warblers, lots of Chipping Sparrows, Eastern Bluebirds and an Eastern Phoebe foraged in the grass and hunted from low branches of trees in large rolling yards.<\/p>\n
Several times I stopped to look for the Golden-crowned Kinglets I could hear \u2013 their calls like high, glassy splinters of ti-ti-ti<\/em>, ti-ti-ti<\/em> \u2013 but they stayed high up and hidden in the multi-colored mix of sunlit leaves and needles.<\/p>\n But another Ruby-crowned Kinglet was much easier to see, calling jidit-jidit<\/em> as it traveled through a stand of privet along the roadside, bright-eyed and perky, moving quickly and lightly and close enough to watch its small round greenish-gray shape, bright white wing-bars, and white eye-ring. No ruby crest was showing. For a few seconds it hovered in the air over a tall weed, its wings a blur, then it flitted back to the privet and wild grape vines and other weeds.<\/p>\n A Red-tailed Hawk circled and climbed in a clear blue sky with blurry white clouds here and there. With large dark brown head, orange-red tail that appeared to be tipped in white, and broad, spread wings, and the pale of its under-side catching the light, it soared, rising above the traffic on the highway and all the roads and houses and noise in more ways than one.<\/p>\n Twelve Black Vultures circled together high in a loose column, climbing up, then sailing off toward the south, one after another.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Late this morning I heard the quick, complex little song of a Ruby-crowned Kinglet coming from the thickets around one corner at the end of our street. The briskly whistled and twittered song sounds exactly like what I might imagine for the tiny, spritely bird. Hearing the song surprised me a little \u2013 it may […]<\/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\/1795"}],"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=1795"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1797,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1795\/revisions\/1797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}