Just wanna mention this before I forget.  And it’s a lumping post.  I didn’t want to do lumping posts but I have so very little to say about the one bird, and still want to say it.  I caught it like pokeymans.  So I’ll talk about it, then its cousin.

Kinglets are tiny-ass borbs.  LBB, but oh so tiny tiny.  Anna’s hummingbirds can be tinier, but they can also be larger – more variable size, at least that’s my perception.  Kinglets are tiny as hell, but do look a bit more conventional for perching birds, otherwise.  Anyway, at that scale, with proportionately huge eyes and puffball-shaped body, they are disgustingly cute.

There are two varieties in Washington state – ruby-crowned and golden-crowned.  I do think both are common enough, but also easy to miss if you’re not paying attention, and they often tuck themselves out of sight in dense bushes or up in canopy.  I’m pretty sure I’ve seen ruby-crowned before, but I wasn’t properly recording observations back then, and the memory has slipped.

But I saw one Friday Jan 24, pretty confidently.  It’s so small it’s very hard to be 100% positive, but in the slightly impressionistic view from over ten feet away, everything was right.  It was being quiet and I didn’t have bird app out, so I couldn’t confirm by vocalization.  And my phone’s camera is no better at distance than my eyes are.  But it was olive drab, small as a hummingbird or bushtit, but with very short tail, a contrasty bar in the wing area, etc.  And when I looked up info, it said they often feed on the ground, which is where this one was.

So ruby-crowned kinglet, snapped up in my pokey-ball.

Golden-crowned kinglets are either much more chatty or much more common, easy to detect on birdy apps throughout the region.  After I got priced out of living in Seattle for the first time as an adult, I landed in about the sixth worst apartment complex in Federal Way, so pretty shitty but not frequent gunshots when we were there.

The interior looked like it had been built in the ’50s or ’60s and there were homophobic slurs misspelled in the closet, “faget faget,” written in lipstick.  But just one step out the door and I got my best view ever of golden-crowned kinglets – a pair of them, right at eye level, within a few feet.  Fantastic.

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