September is a good time to go out and find birds fattening up for the winter. Back in September 2009 at El Polin Spring I watched this Western Tanager stalk a nice fat meal hanging on a willow leaf.
I haven't been able to identify the caterpillar, unfortunately. It seems close to some kind of sphinx moth, but I can't find an exact match. Despite the tanager's powerful beak, he was unable to yank the caterpillar off its leaf.
Berries are much easier to catch. Figuring out this is likely a female or immature Western Tanager was not so easy. I looked her up in Sibley with no luck, but National Geographic led me to understand that the top-pictured bird is a male (yellow on its top wing bar), so it followed that this was a female.
I also tried to google it at one point. How do you google a bird? Even the images didn't cut it. Those birds looked so much more yellow than mine. I woke up in the middle of the night, still thinking about that, and fell into a silly reverie about impossible google searches. Imagine getting a million people, all at once, to search for things that don't exist. Now trending: chewable barbed wire; milk of titanium; carbon trioxide; water pianos; and sunspot remover. Yes, I do get even more goofy than usual at 2 a.m.
It almost looks like this Townsend's Warbler is interested in the little urn-shaped flowers, but there's probably some little insect up there that I just can't see.
This Pygmy Nuthatch seems to have a nutritious little prize.
And this Steller's Jay was going to town on a seed, hammering off the pulp to get at the nut inside.
I recently read an alarming news story about hundreds of thousands of migrating birds that dropped dead in New Mexico. Biologists thought the mass die-off could have been the result of wildfire smoke, drought, and an unusual cold front that swept through. The Fish and Wildlife Service's Forensics Lab (home of the Feather Atlas) is trying to get to the bottom of the mystery.
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