Charlie's Birds - Small birds

This page contains a hodgepodge of smaller birds. Generally I find these birds harder to capture in flight both because they are small and because they tend to move rather fast. I have managed to get some of them in action. Because we have a variety of sparrows in our area, I have given them their own page.

I first discovered these lovely Cedar Waxwings in 2021. It appears they move through our area every winter. In February 2022 I estimate the flock that visited us several times as about 100 birds.

I remember seeing and hearing Mockingbirds frequently in my teens. I don't recall ever seeing this behavior before. There were a number of them each in their own shrub. They would fly straight up maybe 15 to 20 feet then dive straight back down. This repetitive behavior lent itself nicely to capturing some nice action photos.

Western Bluebirds are abundant in our area year round. Their coloring varies quite a bit. The UCSC arboretum has been successful with getting them to occupy human provided bird houses.

This is one of my favorite photos and also one I took relatively early in my birding days. I got really luck with this one.

At certain times of the year we have large numbers of European Starlings the flock along with Red-winged and Tri-colored Blackbirds. All year there are small numbers of Starlings around. In October 2020 I did an estimate for an eBird checklist and counted roughly 1000 birds.

October 2020

Catching the last rays of the day before swarming down into reeds of the Quarry for the night. We would come back before sunrise and watch them swarm up out of the quarry below and fly just over our heads right after the sun came up.

Red-winged blackbirds are abundant in the spring through fall. As I mentioned above, in our area they flock together with European Starlings and Tri-colored Blackbirds. I haven't seen the tri-colored except in the flocks a few times, presumably passing through. The red-wings are around pretty much spring through fall.

In the spring they feed regularly in several fields we pass on our daily late afternoon or evening walks.

Probably a close second for Red-winged Blackbirds in flight.

You can't see the namesake red wing edges here but I really liked the little tufts of feather on the wings.

This little cutie is a House Wren. A rather amusing name given that I saw it far from any houses. We were at the confluence of the the south and middle forks of the Tuolumne rivers, April 2021.

This is a Brown Creeper that I photographed in the Moore Creek Wetland Natural Preserve which is adjacent to (or maybe part of) Natural Bridges State Park.

I decided to include this photo as a prelude to a few photos of swallows. They are really hard to capture in flight. It is fun to see large numbers of them eating the insects just above the summer grass. We often have a mix of Violet-green, Barn, Cliff, and Northern Rough-winged swallows flying together.