A week in the yard

Here are a few pics from our yard in the last 10 days or so. Hope you enjoy them and we hope everyone is having a wonderful Summer!

This is one of the resident Anna's Hummingbirds that we are lucky enough to host in the yard. She is pretty tame and sits for lots of photos.


We caught her doing this the other day and we have since seen it multiple times. She just sits there, and every once in a while, she would open her bill, and then snap it shut. Could she be flycatching? It wasn't hot, so I don't think she was panting. Any ideas?


Here she is doing it again. We have tried to find some info on it, but nothing so far has described what she's doing.


Such a gorgeous bird!

Here is a female Rufous Hummingbird. She flew to this feeder as I was standing next to it, photographing a Downy Woodpecker.

Here's the Downy on it's favorite suet feeder.

He also lets me get pretty close. Such cool looking birds.

Such a cute little face!

As I was photographing the Downy (above), this Cooper's swooped into the yard. The only bird to not get out of the yard was the Downy I was taking pics of. He stayed on the suet feeder, frozen stiff. Poor guy.

I backed away from the Downy so as not to scare him out of the tree and into the hawk's view. As I backed away, the Cooper's flew into the tree I was under and about 5 feet from the Downy. If you look close, you can see the Downy of the right side and in the middle is the Cooper's tail. Fortunately, the hawk flew off and the Downy lived to see another day.

2 of the many newly-fledged Scrub-Jays coming into the yard. Notice the all gray heads.

Another one of the fledglings. Very cute and fluffy.

Here is a newly-fledged Robin. There are young ones all over the yard. Jays, Robins, Sparrows, Chickadees, Cowbirds, Cooper's Hawks. It's a great time to be bird watching!

A Black-Capped Chickadee grabbing a snack.

Here are 8 abandoned (we think) Chickadee eggs. The nest box is on the side of the house and we watched them build it for weeks. Then, they just stopped coming to it. So we took it down, thinking we would just find an empty nest and this is what we found! So the box went immediately back up, but we still haven't seen the Chickadee pair going to it. Why would they abandon an entire nest?