They are not impressive compared to how many pictures are on my eBird… nearly 100k, which is crazy… I am posting more birds for the Biodeversity of Gas Stations project which you can join here
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Here’s a good recording by Gerrit Vyn for you: here
They’re great if you don’t have 86 coming to your feeder every day to scare your doves and eat all your birdseed. Which looks like:
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And sounds like: this (recorded by me from INSIDE the house)
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To me that sounds delightful, birdsong! But I recognize that too many of any one species feels a plague. And I shudder to think of the droppings.
I wish I knew how to record so I could share with you the cacophony of the parrots as they squabble in the flamboyán. There are not even very many of them, (they travel in groups of about ten?), but they are just exquisitely loud.
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Thanks for a fun question! It’s hard not to photograph the dramatic Bald Eagles and Great Blue Herons, and I love all these others. I’m surprised that the Short-billed Gull won out (63 observations) over one of my favorites, the Common Loon (58 observations).
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Yes, I usually make observations of new - for me - species and I don’t repeat many observations for species I encounter more frequently.
I also don’t have a camera, but my best bird pictures were taken with binoculars, not the most expensive ones, but they came with a support for the phone. Maybe you can get one of those. Something like this one: https://tienda.seo.org/adaptador-universal-viking-smartphone/ but there are cheaper.
My top 10 are my neighbors. I tried to stop taking pictures of them, but they make it impossible. Half of them come to the feeder, others I have catched with the wildlife trap camera around the garden.
My garden was abandoned for many years, and the birds have been planting their vegetation and dutifully come to harvest. Right now the ivys and the hawthorns are fruiting, and I get to see a lot of birds that wouldn’t care for the bird feeder.
This Summer we had many heatwaves, and I setup some sort of climate refuge with a mister and several water plates of different sizes on a shady spot. Lots of butterflies, wasps, started hanging out, then came the flycatchers. But lots of my usual birds will stay there chilling.
I work from home and from my desk I can see the bird feeder. It can be quite distracting! But I like the relationship with the blue and coal tits that come everyday and bring their chicks to the feeder, the robin that always comes for the wormy walnuts. The blue tit is my favorite because it takes baths on the water plate. The nuthatchs were very careless about my presence and I could get very close to them, and hoarded lots of seeds in Summer, but now they are gone again.
Sometimes a new bird comes and I can tell because of the way they move, is funny how we learn things without noticing.
Birds that don’t come to the feeder, but come to the water: nightingale, Sardinian warbler, blackbird (these last two don’t drink, but come to bath in winter, when the watering ditch is dry, and on the far away watering plates, never in my presence)
Birds that don’t care about my services at all: crows, doves.
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I’ve tried this technique before, but never with a camera support. Those exist? Until now I’ve needed someone to hold the binoculars while I take the photo or adjust the photo.
They are a bit to costly (1 euro = 88.99 ₹) but I’ll try to get my hands on one. Thanks!
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I don’t have that kind of binocular, and I won’t be buying a new one any time soon :(
I do have a different tri-pod, so maybe I could just make my own out of duc-tape. I’ve done it before, so why not do it again?
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My top 10 all make sense for me.
Birds 2 through 6 are all grassland bird species. For the past 10 years my job has been to survey properties for grassland birds. The only surprise is that Savannah Sparrow outnumbers Grasshopper Sparrow. The latter is my favourite and I photograph it whenever the opportunity arises.
Bird 1 and birds 7 through 10 are all regular visitors to my yard.
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I keep finding House Sparrow feathers. Also I don’t have that many observations of birds because it is very hard to take photos of them with a crappy thirty something dollar camera that becomes very very bad quality when it is zoomed in too far and you can’t even tell what the bird is because of the bad quality.
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The majority of my top ten are species that I’ve observed around town so no real surprises there. I live near a small river and four species that I regularly see but I don’t tend to photograph are Ardea cinerea (Grey Heron · 왜가리) (24 obs.), Ardea alba (Great Egret · 중대백로) (21 obs.), Passer montanus (Eurasian Tree Sparrow · 참새) (21 obs.), and Columba livia (Rock Pigeon · 집비둘기)
I’m a little surprised to see P. auroreus second, as I didn’t realize I had taken so many photos of that one. Cormorants ·가마우지 and Mandarin Ducks · 완앙 aren’t common on the river here but I do try to take a photo each time I see one and I’ve also gotten a few observations from down in Seoul as well. The Black-tailed Gull · 괭이갈매기 is a species that I’ve seen along the West Sea · 서해, East Sea · 동해, and South Sea · 남해 so it’s not a big surprise that it’s in my Top 10.
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A typical list of birds from an garden in Southern England. Only real surprise is that it doesn’t include Blackbird but does include Moorhen, which is a very infrequent visitor.
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I generally don’t target birds for iNat. Mine are mainly feeder birds that I can photograph out my window or large birds. The sapsucker and song sparrow are the oddballs. They don’t come to my feeder and they’re not that big. I probably get more photos so I can use them for ID purposes.
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I sometimes use observations to add dots on the observation map when traveling, which is reflected in the number of house sparrows and rock pigeons. Other than that it’s typical Central TX birds, except the surprise hooded crow which is a bird I record every time I spot one when visiting Europe.
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