Trash Birds and Other Familiars!

And with great fanfare and much ado, we bid farewell to October, the best month of the year!

As it must, it went out with a BANG...

Or, really, a deluge! It seems that raining heavily on Halloween continues to be Seattle tradition. 

But never say that the intrepid few shall not be met with an abundance of spooky goodness! The people in our neighborhood are shockingly all-out when it comes to Halloween. I feel a little bad for them given how light the attendance, but it works out for us. Allan usually is goaded to "take a few more" because nobody wants to end up with that much leftover candy. 

Bonus: most of the Halloween decorations can be creatively flipped into Christmas or Thanksgiving to those who want to put in the effort. I think more people here decorate for Halloween, honestly, but I can't say that for certain. 

We were "trash birds" - my favorite birds. I was a pigeon, Allan was (of course!) a crow, and I got Andrew a seagull costume to round out the lot. 

The artist's rendition!

Now, of course, the fun has wrapped up, and we begin the long slog to the holidaze! At least we do so with plenty of glow sticks, candy and (for some reason) mini muffins!

And this is a good time of year for our little bird feeder, as it turns out. Late fall through winter is when birds have a harder time getting noms on their own, so they flock to readymade noms where possible. 

But the trees are more fun to play in!

Luckily, birds do not mind the rain. They have special preen oils that help make them a bit waterproof, so they are out and about scooping up worms and grubs with abandon! 

Peanuts are welcome with any weather!

Squirrels don't seem to mind it too much either... 

Currently, we have about three squirrels who show up in our yard. Two of them are regulars while the third only occasionally shows up. We've named them Mayhem, Chaos, and Anarchy (May, Kay, and Ana for short).

I think this is Chaos

Zero guarantees that I'm consistently calling any one of them by any particularly consistent name, but we tend to think that Anarchy has less gray in her coat and is generally the purer redhead, Mayhem is theoretically a little larger (and shows up far more often than either of the others), and Chaos is a little bit smaller and seems to be the most gonzo of the squirrels.

Mayhem tends to show up right around 8:30 or so every morning. They start with the unshelled pecans, grabbing one at a time and skulking off with it to find a nice cache spot to bury it and (probably) forget about it. We're gonna be growing pecan trees in no time!

Mayhem will continue caching about half the plate, before coming back to nom on the remaining almonds and peanuts. 

Mayhem with a phone spycam

Chaos shows up a bit later and they chase each other around. Chaos eats whatever's fallen on the ground, and some remaining pepitas. If Chaos is feeling cheeky, they tend to get a little crazy with the bird feeder. 

 After a few "incidents," I moved the feeding table much  much farther away from the bird feeder (and our house). This seems to have reduced successful incidents, but Chaos is quite good at climbing the feeder pole regardless, and they are relatively decent at making just enough kinetic chaos to at least cause a mess underneath the feeder. Chaos has also managed to leap several feet from the fence line to at least grab onto the feeder before falling. It's impressive to watch, albeit a fair bit distressing at the same pace.

 

Goobers!

More in line with original intentions, we also have our regular bird visitors.

Our first visitors were dark eyed juncos. Now there are a handful of juncos who show up on the regs to hoover up the ground. I can't even try to distinguish them, although there's definitely one that's paler and probably female and some that are darker and definitely male. I think some of them are smaller as well, so I'm guessing we have family dynamics going on. 

 I don't know why juncos get a special name instead of just being called brown/slate ground sparrows or whatnot. I do know that they were named such by Johan Wager and juncus is latin for rush or reed. There's some sources on the internet that suggest he named them this because they resembled the European Reed Sparrow, which were listed as "juncos" at the time, and maybe some other thrush type birds had been called juncos before that. Needless to say, dark eyed juncos have no interest in rushes or reeds and they aren't European at all. But I like the name. It has a little punk quality to it, is all. 

 In most of the country. dark eyed juncos show up as winter is coming, so they are also known as "snow birds," but from what I can tell, they live here year-round. Plentifully. 

My favorite part about juncos is that they have these pure white tail and wing feathers that they twitch out in a really fashionable style when they flick them. It's a pretty little accent that is most noticeable when they are flying too quickly to really identify much else about them. Handy. 

We also have one spotted towhee. (toe-eeeeee seems to be the most popular pronunciation, so have fun!) Like juncos, Towhees are sparrows, but they're kinda huge sparrows with red eyes and a lot of heft. Unlike Juncos, their naming is pretty simple: they make a call that sounds a bit like toe-eeeeeeee. Gotta love the onomatopoeic names.  

And... 

Two male house finches and one female house finch. 

Malse house finches absorb carotenoids from their diet to get that reddish pink coloring!

One white crowned sparrow. 

Dino birdie!

And several chickadees, one of whom is chestnut backed and most of whom are black capped. Since there's only one chestnut backed chickadee, they get to be Dee. Additional chickadees are DeeDee, Deedeedee and so on depending on order of appearance.

Baby Chickadee has a lil brown cape!

And yes, while they are a voluminous representative of the tit family (snicker snicker, never stops being funny, trust me), they are named for the ever iconic alarm call that they make. Kind of like naming a person "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH HELP HELP!" 

Fun fact: the bigger the threat the more "dee" will be repeated at the end of chickadee. So, a human walking around gets maybe a chickadeedee. A red tailed hawk will get a chickadeedeedeedeemotherfuckingDEE. Other birds listen for this to assess threat levels! Anyways! 

 We also get the occasional hummingbird, which is I'm pretty sure an Anna's Hummingbird

Probably not Ana the Squirrel's hummingbird, though

Did I mention that I love naming conventions in bird categorization. While you have some fabulous names (see above), you also have a grand mix of random feature of bird + general species or geographic feature + general species or name of famous birder + general species. 

It's like when your kid has several friends name Anna, so you distinguish them by calling them Blonde Anna, West Seattle Anna, and Dan's Anna. 

We just have Squirrel Ana, hereabouts. 

Then you have things like "tree sparrow," a fairly inaccurate name considering they prefer marches and ground cover, but they were named such because the American tree sparrow looks like a European tree sparrow who actually does like trees. I think they do anyways. Sound familiar? Naturalists were really just winging this shit back in the day (haha, see what I did there?). Which I suppose is why we have murders of crows and unkindnesses of ravens. 

Plotting evil!

(Though side story, apparently crows and ravens are known to chase smaller birds in a way that harries them right into large windows in addition to several other clever but fatal trickeries, so they aren't exactly going around in kindnesses and compassions)

In addition to the regulars, we've had some more novel avian guests. The other day, a gull swooped down in all their resplendent glory, guzzled some cashews, knocked the water bowl off the table with their massive wings, and took off in a carnage of scattered nuts and seeds!

There also seems to be one crow who stops by and grazes on the cashews from time to time. This depends on the timing being such that Crowly is around before Mayhem and Chaos have made off with the entire plate of goodies. But occasionally it occurs. 

The other crows will hang out while Crowly eats, but so far no other takers for actual nomming

In other bird-buddy news, the pond crow-bros are still hanging in their Pond Park locale. It's starting to get a little bit like The Birds down there, except they mostly just fly up next to me, wait for me to leave some food, take and hide all the food, then continue following me around the pond continuing to await additional nom-noms. They still aren't exactly perching on my shoulder or anything, but they've reduced the "safe distance" a fair bit since we first met. 

We aren't 100% sure who is who all the time, but the boldest one has been named Peanut: 

Beautiful baby!

We also have Cashew, who tends to be a little less forward than Peanut, but often comes along with Peanut to "fly nearby and then wait expectantly." 

Here featured with a cashew that is about to be stashed somewhere

The third and shyest one is Pecan. I voted for Pepita since the crows aren't that interested in Pecans, but Pecan is cute, and Allan gets the last say on this. 

There are a handful of additional crows that stop by, but the trio of crow-bros are the only constants at this point. 

Just recently, I find I have slightly more of a hesitant following on the streets that leads towards the park. I need to always remember to restock before going out. I'm a little afraid of what will happen when all the hungry little crows show up and I don't have any more food!

I mean, I have seen crows mobbing for less. And, yes, I've seen The Birds a couple of times. They do kind of all arrive and lurk just like the scary scenes in that movie. 

But I like to think they have a little love for their yellow hatted peanut strewer. Or at least the forward thinking enough to keep her alive long enough to restock the peanuts. 

I like the birds though. Our relationship is simple: I throw food at them, and they recognize me as food-thrower and take a little less distance from me than the average stranger. I get some special attention, and we make just that little spark of cross species regard that feels surprisingly warm.

 I kind of wish people were a little more like this! But in a sense, I guess they are.

 Apparently, a lot of our sense of community and place is defined by the incidental familiar people. The barista and the cashier and the same general neighbors crossing the street every day. Even when you never form any further relationship, the familiarity and proximity is supposed to be a huge grounding thing. 

So I guess, it kind of is the same if we think of sharing peanuts as akin to flashing a half smile or little nod. 

But I think my babies are generally prettier!

Ah well. 

Throwing y'all a handful of peanuts and retreating to a save distance so you can eat and cache them!

Off to the Cat Convention for the rest of my family and off to a very rainy walk for me!

Happy November!!