The Beauty of Birds

Posted on by Joyful2bee

I am developing a new hobby. My porch/patio has bushes in front of it and a lovely, little red maple tree. It is a wonderful place to eat breakfast on cool mornings. I enjoy being close to nature and having nature almost at my fingertips. Birds and squirrels eat the china berries off of the bushes. Bees spread pollen around on the little flowers on some of the bushes. Sometimes a spider will build its web between the tree and the bushes. I have seen rabbits eating close to the screen. I think they add so much interest and beauty to our world.

I recently discovered that different times of the day I could open the windows in my bedroom and hear the birds while I eat a meal or tickle the ivories (keys) of my computer keyboard. Now that spring is here the birds are out making nests, calling to each other, and flying around looking for food and mates. Lately I have become curious about which bird is making which sound.

Did you know that anywhere your cell phone works you can look up and identify birds by their calls. I discovered a neat phone app, BirdNET. It can record the bird’s song; then you use the “Select brackets” to indicate a segment of that bird’s song; then press “Analyze.” It shows a picture of the bird, information about it, and gives you a chance to submit verification that they got it right.

Also YouTube has a wealth of videos on birds, their eating habits, their songs, their colors, appearance, and lifestyles,

These are my photos of a few birds I’ve seen. With their colorful plumage, enchanting songs and nest building designs they are a fascinating, joyful presence in my world. I’ve begun to attempt to learn each bird’s song, but it will take time. Birds after all have different calls with different meanings.

I never saw a Towhee until this year. They look like a robin with white on its body and some white on the wings. They will repeat their lilting whistle in response to your efforts to copy them. They seem so friendly. I even had a “conversation” with one recently. He made one call, which I imitated. He repeated it with two calls, and I repeated with two calls. We went back and forth another time or two and then he added a warble to two calls. I surrendered to his prowess in singing. Warbling is a bit beyond my pitiful bird call skills.

Hummingbird
Hummingbird
Baby Blue Jay
Baby Blue Jay
Flicker
Red Bellied Woodpecker feeding
004
Red House Finch
This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is sea-gull-050.jpg
Seagull in Flight 
Hawk hunting in grass.
Roadside Hawk hunting in grass.
Red Macaw

21 thoughts on “The Beauty of Birds”

Leave a Reply

Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.