Our Fall & Winter Birds:
Well, fall is here and winter is on its way. It’s time to start looking for your new visitors. The summertime birds have flown south for the winter. I’m sure there are some of you that wish you can fly south for the winter too. It would be nice, but you would miss the beauty of the fall colors that are spread out throughout the Valley and then the white beauty of our snow fall we get in the winter. Before you book your flight to the Valley of the Sun, remember we’re not as bad as North Dakota or Minnesota. Think about the winters they have and ours isn’t so bad.
I’ve noticed my feeders aren’t being used as much this last week. My bird counts have dropped a lot over the last two to three weeks. Instead of changing our hummer feeders every other day, I change them once a week now. I was down at one of my ponds with my dogs and I flushed a pair of mergansers. They just flew to my other pond and wait for us to leave and they’ll fly back. They were my first mergansers of the fall. Of course the dogs aren’t very happy, because many of the frogs are gone and that means there’s less things to chase.
So, what are the birds I see here in O’Brien each year during the winter? The first one that comes to mind are the purple finches, chickadees, nuthatches, varied thrush, spotted towhee and pine siskin, wood duck, mergansers, gray heron and geese. Of course we get the year-round house wrens, quail, doves, blue jays, flickers and woodpeckers.
I remember a few years ago, we had a nice snow during the night and I put cracked corn and nut mix on my deck under my picnic table. It was the only place that was clear of snow. After a couple of hours I looked out and there were 30-40 purple finches feeding. No other birds, just purple finches. It was a sight.