Swallows is the same.  More or less.  I mentioned how they partition niches based on where they feed, with barn swallows down low?  Violet-green swallows feed higher up, around seven to twelve meters.  They are white beneath, and green and violet on top.  More or less.  At that elevation and as fast as they fly, I’d have never been able to ID them, without a few exceptional sunny days.

My father is harried by demons and can’t stand living in the same place more than a few months.  As he’s gotten old, he’s had to slow down the rate of moves more than he would prefer.  But after the first time he got a housing voucher, he briefly lived in an old folks home overlooking the Green River.  There he went off the rails for birding, for the first time ever, getting too much equipment and drawing too many birds, which bothered the neighbors.  One time he filmed a seal swimming in the river – way upstream from the Sound.  I wasn’t there for most of it – certainly not for the inevitable problem era when he made everybody too mad and flamed out and lost the home.  But I did have one visit.

On that occasion, we sat on his balcony on a sunny day, about ten meters elevation.  Ever sit on a balcony above a body of water?  In the summer?  The fucking insects were huge.  Creepy things I can’t even describe, multiple inches.  They eventually scared me indoors.  But before they did, I saw many violet-green swallows from above, from pretty close by, and that means I could see the violet-green distinctly shining in the sun.

Some years later, at the same Uwajimaya that once made my home boy herfy, I came out into the bright summer sun and saw violet-green swallows swooping around a paved corporate courtyard that usually only has house sparrows, pigeons, and gulls.  Were they nesting in the rafters of Uwajimaya, or the buck nasty hobo bar Joe’s?  It was a little magical.  I have no idea how they were getting enough food without those fat river insects.

Last place I saw them was in (hopefully) the last apartments I ever lived in, up in Federal Way.  There were swallows flying around at the usual height, with white bellies.  I couldn’t make out the top color, but I used the birding app to recognize their squeaks.  Violet-green.

They’re pretty cool.  If you’re in their range, hope you get to see them someday.

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Swallows is the same.  This one looks like barn swallows but with no orange on bottom – just white beneath, iridescent blue on top.  I haven’t seen them feeding as often as barn swallows or violet-greens, but when I have, it was even higher elevation than VGs, maybe twelve to twenty meters?

I have to imagine they got their name from nesting in trees, but I have seen them in nest boxes barely above human height, right out in the middle of a field.  It’s the only reason I can say I’ve positively ID’d them before.  I have also seen swallows on a bright day flying near treetops (in WA state) and thought, likely but not certain.

The place with the nest boxes was some kind of wildlife reserve next to a busy freeway in Kansas, because of course it was next to a busy freeway.  It was the kind of place people come to have sad outdoor sex, with patchy clouds and drips of rain, the fields wet and marshy – dotted with bushes and small trees.  My brother brought me there on the last day of a poorly planned visit, for last minute birding.

The visitor center had some taxidermy birds of prey.  The red tailed hawk was smaller than I would have imagined.  In the fields we saw a lot of red-winged blackbirds at various growth stages, and a few proud yellow meadowlarks.  The weirdest thing we saw was these orange slimy gelatinous-looking finger-like structures on the branches of a small pine.  Slime molds?  An actual fungus?  Fruiting bodies?  I know next to nothing of these subjects.

The last thing we did that day before I got on the plane was going to a fast food place called Freddy’s.  We don’t have those in WA state.  They have skinny fries and smashed burgers with charred edges.  That makes everything more crispy and rich.  Baller.  I’m not eating as much beef now because global warming, but if I get a chance to have that again, I will do it at least once.  Gag in the Bag recently added “smashed” burgers to their menu, but if they aren’t also charred, they are missing the entire point.

Oh yeah, birds.  Iridescent blue on top and white underneath.  Cute.  Fast.  Maybe you can see them too.

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Swallows is the same.  I would have been very justified in only doing one life list entry for all of them, because they aren’t all that different from each other, to an inexpert eye.  Normally I wouldn’t be able to pick out differences like this, but I have had some fortunate encounters over the years which made those differences more plain – situationally.

Cliff swallows are much like barn swallows – white and orange on bottom, iridescent blue on top – but the orange white and blue are in funkier stripes and swatches on cliff swallows.  Their look reminds me of over-designed tennis shoes.  That’s why barn swallows are the ones in tattoos.

I guess the main difference would be nesting in cliffs?  And artificial structures that have similar qualities, like under bridges and eaves.  The only reason I’ve ever seen one well enough to positively ID it – to tell the difference between it and a barn swallow – is that there is a nesting site at the Billy Frank Jr Nisqually National Wildlife refuge, which for all I know has an invisible dei in front of its url and is about to be renamed The White Mayonnaise National Pile of Mosquitoes and Birds We’re Going to Kill Wetland Condos.

That nesting site is a covered walkway near the visitor center, which has nests used by multiple species of swallows, rubbing shoulders with each other.  They’re so close to passers by that you could reach out and grab them*.  Fantastic!  I don’t know what season they’re around, don’t remember what time of year I was there because seasons not very distinct in the PNW.  But if you can find that out and pay a visit, you will get swallows on your own life list.

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*don’t, of course.

Yet another species with intercontinental distribution, depending on how you define species, barn swallows are the easiest swallows to meet.  They feed low to the ground, favoring open fields like mowed parks, school grounds, golf courses, and graveyards.  This is how I see them where I live; probably they have more natural circumstances in more rustic areas.  Swallows take insect prey in flight without even slowing down, flapping and whooshing everywhere at extreme speeds.  Their mouths are huge, open like a windsock when they suck down the bugs.

As common as they are, they are very beautiful – one of the stereotypical tattoos of hipsters for years.  There are color variations, but mostly they have orange bellies and iridescent blue on top.  I’ve only ever seen them sitting still at a considerable distance, drinking from a mud puddle at Point Defiance Zoo, or resting on the streetlamp in front of my condo.

Seeing them in flight, on the other hand?  Real easy to do.  It seems swallows partition their niches in part by elevation, and barn swallows feeding closest to the ground, you’re not unlikely to run into them.  My husband told me that when he was very young, about seven or eight, a boy in his school accidentally kicked one.  It survived, but that couldn’t feel great.

They do it to themselves.  For some reason they are daredevils, intentionally flying in front of cars and bicycles and humans.  This might be why they like cemeteries – the obstacle course – and moving obstacles are so much the better for demonstrating their agility.  …Or they are trying to eat the bugs that are stirred up in front of us.

The first place I took special note of them was at Game Farm Park in Auburn, years before my current interest in birds began.  They also made an impression at my husband’s uncle’s funeral, zipping through headstones.  And once I saw a few in actual barn territory, when I went to rural Kansas for my brother’s wedding.  His father-in-law took us out to some scratchy fields to look at dilapidated barns that had been in the family since colonial days.

Barn swallows?  In my barn?  It’s more likely than you think.

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I know fuck-all about diamond doves.  Is that even what they’re actually called, where they’re from?  I just remember seeing them in cages at the pet store.  Picture a pigeon but smaller and pastel.  Very nice-looking.  If you could get one to be hand friendly, I bet they’d be very pleasing to hold.  Are they just a fancy pigeon breed?  I don’t think so?  I have a vague impression most fancy breeds are the usual size or bigger, not that smol.  Could be wrong.

Anyway, diamond doves makes me think of Diamond Dogs by David Bowie, which was kind of a cheap rip-off a Rolling Stones song.  Turnabout’s fair play and the Stones did a transparent ripoff of Diamond Dogs called Saint of Me.  I wonder could I hum one of these tunes well enough that yewchoob’s algorithm can auto-detect and copyright flag it?  Suck up my non-existent ad revenue to pay the RIAA some fractional pennies?

The last time I went to the pet store, they didn’t have diamond doves anymore.  Did they get busted for trafficking protected animals?  Did they go extinct in the wild?  Did they just become too pricey or inconvenient in some way?  Goodbye diamond doves.

My favorite pet store animal is the bearded dragon.  Problem is, the ones in the store are literal babies.  I’m given to understand adults are a foot long and produce copious stanky shits.  The moar u kno.

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Barn owls are one of those species with “global distribution,” where one could consider the barn owls of Europe to be the same species as the ones in Texas and Kinshasa and Kwangtung.  Are they tho?  I’m sure there are “cryptic” species hidden within that range, noteworthy subspecies, etc.  They are the most visible members of their branch of owlkind, the Tytonidae.  Tytonids are less likely to have feather “ears” than “true owl” strigids, and generally look like “shy guys” from mario brothers.

I’ve personally seen one in a zoo and one in the wild.  I used to walk back and forth across Auburn in the middle of the night, often between two and four AM.  Once – I think this was when I was living in the adjacent tiny town of Pacific – I was walking the Interurban Trail and saw a ghost white headless-looking thing float above the trail, from the trees on one side to the trees on the other.  A fleeting glimpse, but enough to – in conjunction with range information – positively ID the suspect.

My dad used to know this shitty neonazi who dabbled in “vulture culture” before that term was coined.  Barn owls are not infrequently hit by cars, and this dude randomly hit barn owls twice within a pretty short time on the exact same stretch of road.  He preserved the bodies in some way, I don’t recall – skeletonizing or taxidermy, whatever.  I never actually saw them.  When this particular neonazi hadn’t fully turned but was beginning his descent, he gave my dad his Dead Kennedys tape, and that’s how I came to receive my first hardcore punk rock album, In God We Trust, Inc. (prior to this i only had dead milkmen CDs).  I guess as the punk became nazi, he felt the need to fuck off.

When I was in junior high, we got to dissect owl pellets.  Some may have come from barn owls; impossible for us to know.  But it was super cool and interesting.  I don’t normally like anything to do with excretions – piss, shit, vomit – but dry owl pellets seem rather sterile.  Bleached white by stomach acid, they are little blocks of compressed fur and bone that came out the front end of the bird, so they didn’t have to waste digestive resources on the hard bits.  Pick apart a little block of fur and find interesting tiny bones.  The skulls of those rodents looked so cool to baby Bébé.

Anyway, being a massively successful species, they provide some hope to me for the biosphere.  Whatever we do to this world, barn owls will probably pull through.  Shine on, you funky ghosts.  Keep eating rodents and puking up the cool parts.  I’m down.

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Anna’s hummingbird is pretty much the only hummingbird you will see in great stretches of its range.  You don’t even have to look it up or carefully scrutinize blurry photographs, or lure them with a feeder and bust out the field guide.  If you see a hummingbird in Seattle, it’s a fuckin’ anna’s, with a very outside chance of the very different and unmistakable rufous hummingbird.  I’ve never seen the latter, I’ve seen tons of the former.

The reason it’s often the only hummingbird in town is that it has had an incredible expansion of its historic range, moving farther north than any other hummingbird alive.  Some people in my household claim to have seen them in Alaska years ago; that paper I linked only mentions them breeding as far north as British Columbia.  I’ve personally watched as an Anna’s had a snowflake land on its head, proportionally the size of a fancy hat.  When we lived in the U District, somebody in the courtyard of our apartment building, right on The Ave, had a feeder, and the lil guys would perch in a small tree there in easy view of anybody coming and going.  They persist all year, doing their thing.

It’s hard for me to believe this is all on the back of feeders and flower gardens, but that must be the case.  If so, when the humans go bye-bye, so do the birds.  Hopefully they’ll find a good place to be when the biosphere comes to grips with us, and with the size of their population, they’ve got better odds than a lot of hummingbird species.

Their main song is a quiet grindy sound, but it has an amazing power to carry over great distance.  I’ve heard the call, then looked to see them in trees up to a hundred feet from where I was standing.  Learn it and listen for it whenever you’re around feeders or blooming flowers – especially fuchsias and other deep pink things.  You might just hear it in places you didn’t expect.  It carries much more effectively than the humming of their wingbeats.

I could write more about how wild and freaky hummingbirds are, but it’s pretty common knowledge and I don’t have much time.  But I’m glad this particular species is keeping us company, in places where other hummingbirds fear to tread.

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What’s that thing you spotted at the treeline?  Is spotted towhee, comrade.

Some articles out there will copy-paste the idea that spotted towhees are timid and hide from people, but I don’t think it’s actually true.  One time my husband nearly stepped on a spotted towhee while we were walking to the bus stop.  We had an amazing view of it.  Black hood and back, rusty blood red eyeball and flank, pale grey belly.  Larger than chickadees, more the typical size range of emberizid sparrows.  And of course, they have a lil’ spatter of pretty white spots.

They might just seem easy to miss because they favor thick, short trees – especially evergreen pines.  However, even in those trees, they aren’t too hard to spot, because they like to perch near the top.  One time I went to the beach at Dash Point and a towhee begged for food from us.  On another PNW beach, out on one the islands, I came across a bunch of short pines with a bunch of towhees in them – more than I’d ever seen before.

Spotted towhees are perching birds, which are united in having a very long backward-facing toe called the hallux.  They use this to grip tree branches.  Small passerines like this sometimes feed on the ground by poking through leaf litter, making little backward hops.  The hallux pushes the leaves apart, and they grab any grubs they see after the sweeping move.  My husband pointed one out to me that was doing this.  Since then I’ve also seen another species do it – I think dark-eyed juncos?

It makes me think of James Brown.  Jump back, wanna kiss myself.  Ungh!

But yes.  Spotted towhees.  Cute.  Common.  They screech like a little pterodactyl.  Sometimes they make a “cellphone” call similar to a dark-eyed junco.  Keep an ear out and you’re more likely to see them.  And enjoy.

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EDIT:  Forgot to mention, dark-eyed juncos have varied color over their range, but in the PNW, their colors are oddly similar to a spotted towhee.  They both have a cellphone call, and it makes me wonder, are our local juncos impersonating towhees?  This would be similar to how downy woodpeckers look like hairy woodpeckers, which has been postulated to help them benefit from the reputation of or avoid aggression from the larger birds.  Juncos being smaller than towhees, and locally more similar to them than elsewhere, the samey call…

If I had time to science it, I would attempt to observe if juncos make the cellphone call while doing anything else junco-ish, or while acting territorial.  Also whether juncos in other regions without the “oregon” markings make that call.  Or whether they look similar to other birds in their respective areas.  That kind of shit.

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I had no idea what I was seeing.  I had no idea when the day began that I’d be up a mountain, getting snowed on in October.  But it was a good time.  Canada jays are Perisoreus jays, which I think are more closely related to Eurasian magpies than to American jays?  I dunno.  I’m no scholar about this stuff.  It’s all google if I feel up to it.  But on my honeymoon, we randomly went up to a lookout at Hurricane Ridge, in the Olympic National Rainforest, and saw these birds.  Never before or since.

They’re bold.  I heard that they are so used to getting food from humans that you can hand feed them, and I regret not trying that while I was up there.  They seemed bold enough.  I saw one buzz within three feet of another hiker.  It took me a while to work out the ID.  I certainly hadn’t expected them to be corvids.  They seem a bit smaller than other jays, which themselves are smaller than crows.  Maybe about robin sized?  Mostly grey-white, a little bit of black around the back of the head and more on the wings.  Dark grey beak, dark button eyes.  Nice.

Based on where we were, this was most likely the “obscurus” subspecies, which sounds cool, whether or not it’s actually at all interesting.  It isn’t.  Pay it no nevermind.  To me, this bird will remain associated with my honeymoon, like ravens, like red-tailed hawk cries, like peacocks in the road.  Much more personally interesting, even if that doesn’t transmit to y’all.

I have to imagine that somebody in my readership has much more experience with them.  Holler at ya dogg.  I’d be interested to know more about them.

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Stellers Georg was some kinda colonial naturalist who mushroom-stamped his name on tons of beautiful and rare creatures, some of which were famously driven to extinction by colonizers.  The push to rename birds like the “steller’s jay” … I really hope it works out.  Fairly certain some needledick mosquitofucker from le Fed will firebomb any university that endorses it tho.  One thought on these guys was just to call them the stellar jay, which seems appropriate enough.  They are exemplary creatures, with a head black like the cosmos and white streaks for eyebrows like shooting stars.

These jays are the only ones I’ve ever seen in Federal Way.  No scrub jays up there, no blue jays in this part of the state.  No big deal!  Stellar jays are enough.  They are very deft and sprightly, bounding and elegantly flapping up and down the canopy, jacking your peanuts, screeching whenever it’s screeching time.  Jays are corvids, but next to crows, they are supermodels and olympic gymnasts.  And yet, who is dominating in the colonized landscape?  I favor this analogy – jay is to crow as gibbon is to human.  A gibbon is brightly colored and very talented, cute and cool and amazing.  But humans win.  Brute force and pointed sticks.

I’ve wondered before in the comment section of a much smarter person than myself, could stellar jays be the result of a hybridization event between crows and blue jays?  They look like a blue jay that slipped and fell in a puddle of crow black, immersing their upper body in it.  Hence another suggested name, the black-crested jay.  I know some very distantly related bird species can hybridize.  This happens more commonly with waterfowl than with perching birds.  Still, I’m less inclined to believe it now.  Blacker color schemes can easily arise by convergence, and there’s no reason to doubt that happened.  But if genetics prove that crank theory right someday, I will be crowing about it.  haha.  crow.

Can I get through even one of these posts without mentioning american crows?

Anyway, I’m now in a two-jay neighborhood, with both stellar jays and california scrub jays.  It’s very cool.  At least, it will be until the icecaps melt and my condo is below sea level.  Until that day, let the jays screech for me as often as they please.

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