I’ve never seen a budgerigar in the wild, but my husband and his mom have, years ago.  A pet budgie had gone feral, and was living among a flock of absolute non-parrots, in the suburban municipality of Fife, Washington.  Between them, they are not quite sure what the other birds in the flock were, but lean toward invasive starlings.  Starlings and budgies are both screechy little guys with some amount of mimicry, that can feed on the ground, that don’t belong here, and that naturally hang out in big flocks.  Seem like reasonable company for each other.  This unremarkable green parrot gave them a magical moment, and went on its way.

There was an early British heavy metal band called Budgie, whose lead singer had one of those Geddy Lee-Dennis DeYoung helium voices.  I understand he lost the ability to sing in that range in later years, but still performed.  Going from memory here, I think Budgie wanted to do heavy heavy metal, but without the satanic element.  Bowdlerizing?  Budgerigarizing.  Anyway, Metallica sorta famously covered their hit “Breadfan,” which was about how being greedy makes your life hollow.  Real shit, buddy.  I mean, budgie.

Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, for reasons not quite clear to me, have a little aviary devoted to budgies.  Just regular little pet store animals.  You get some seeds on a twig, hold it out, and watch them go.  Last time I actually went in the zoo (was it my last birthday?), the budgie spot was closed – but you could hear them screeching it up.  The budgening does not stop.

I have to confess, I don’t find most parrots to be attractive birds.  Their colors are on the boring side of clown crap, to me.  But budgies put together an unusually nice ensemble for a parrot.  The ultraviolet cheek spot is cool.  The contrasty elements vary in shape and boldness over the body in a way that makes for a nice composition.  While they are a dime a dozen in pet stores coast to coast here, I think they look nicer than some much more prestigious parrots.  Respect.

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GO ‘HAWKS!  WOOO!  I kid, I kid.  I don’t give a fucking fuck about amurrican roids ‘n’ brain damage -styled football.  But the Seahawks have been around in the periphery of my consciousness many a year.  Seahawk is another word for osprey, so just to squeeze more wordcount out of these birds, I’m gonna talk about hucking the ol’ pigskin.

Colors:  Green and blue are the team colors.  Those colors don’t go great together, in my humble opinion.  Too “Captain Planet.”

Local Billionairism:  One of Bill Gates’ old buddies Paul Allen owned the ‘Hawks while he was alive, and I indirectly worked for his ass during a few of those years.  I don’t much care, but it puts me in mind of the bitter fact I have, in past jobs, been close enough to some famous billionaires that I could have just reached out and… I kid, I kid.  Unless..?  No, no, of course not… … …

The Kingdome:  Sports arena sponsored by local TV station King 5, started losing bits of roof, got replaced expensively.  Subject of much one note local humor.  Speaking of local humor, I have some affection for the old TV show Almost Live!, which, last I checked, was airing in reruns after SNL on NBC.  That last checkin was a long-ass time ago.  As was the moment in history when Bill Nye was on that show.  For whatever that’s worth to whoever.  Enjoy some Pat Cashman.

Good times.  Anyway,

Parking Garages:  You can tell a lot about sportball fandom by how badly they fuck up the parking garages nearest the playing fields.  I never noticed any especial damage for the women’s soccer or the hockey teams, but baseball, men’s soccer, and football would definitely leave their mark.  People get messy.  Baseball fans are just tipsy enough to accidentally drop their wallets or other little bits and bobs.  Soccer fans leave half-eaten boxes of oranges, clothing items, and other oddities.  Football fans invariably knock the garage’s gatearms off their posts.  One time a rich drunk fucko that came to get his eighty thousand dollar SUV -after the garage had closed for the night- crashed it through two concrete bollards and a metal roll-down fence, in order to get home.

That’s my menial job’s eye view of amurrican football.

How about some birds?  One time in a gas station parking lot in Federal Way, I heard some bizarre bird calls from the treetops, and busted out the birdy app.  It was ospreys, having the biggest conversation I’ve ever heard from them.

Accipitriform birds of prey -hawks, eagles, old world vultures, ospreys- usually nest on broad platforms at the tops of tall trees.  On a cellphone tower near the Walmart I used to work in, I once saw some ospreys hanging out.  Trying to nest?  What was interesting to me about this sighting is that one of the birds had a whole-ass cardboard box in its talons, and was flying it up the tower.  Was there anything in the box?  Tasty fish?  A gwyneth paltrow head?  An Alice in Chains?  A British one-hit wonder?  Or was it nesting material?  I just think it looked cool.

Ospreys are sooo easy to see here, around the Puget Sound.  Go close to water.  Look at treetops, or out in the shallows.  Watch them grab fish.  A sunny day is best because the fish are often shiny and silver, which makes the birds easier to spot at a distance.  Once saw one when I was walking across the Ballard Bridge, resting briefly on a street sign there.

Ospreys are one of those birds with worldwide distribution, so you might know about ’em no matter where you are.  They are white and brown, leaning toward the white.  Heads are white with a dark brown mask.  They are famous for reversing one of their toes to get a better grip on a fish.

I had a birthday a few years ago where I went to the beach.  Briefly I waded out to get a better look at a heron, and an osprey flew by at the same time.  Fun.  But the water was piss warm and full of slimy kelp and humans.  Ugh.

The US military has a tilt-rotor aircraft called the Osprey, courtesy of Boeing.  It looks cool, looks like a good design to do vertical or short takeoff & landing.  But it’s been problematic enough to call into question whether any aircraft built on that idea can ever be fully safe, over the years taking dozens of soldiers to their graves.  On the other hand, maybe it’s just motherfucken Boeing.

Bird doesn’t have that problem.  Nature wins again.

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Chickadees are American tits, like the stuff I got in my shirt, hey-O!  heyoheyoheyoHey-O!  Haha.  Got ’em.

But seriously, they’re iconic birds of North America, hugely successful and widespread, to the point I have to wonder, like I do with dark-eyed juncos, if they are out of balance with their natural condition, as a result of human restructuring of the world.

That’s mostly black-capped chickadees, but of course, there are other close relatives of those birds.  Of them, the only one I’m ever likely to see is the chestnut-backed chickadee, because they are found in similar environments to the black-capped – namely, in trees and bushes around humans.

They have to be niche partitioning somehow, to have such a close relative in the same range.  What are CBCs doing differently?  Well, for one thing, they are not completing their sentences.  They are mumblecore chickadees with vocal fry, or whatever you call it.  BCCs are well known for their chickadee call, which in practice is more like “Tsickida-BEE BEE BEE.”  I could be wrong about this because it’s hard to get a clear enough view of the bird making the call, but it seems to me CBCs say Tsickida but never BEE.  Kinda like, halfway between the indistinct squeaking of bushtits and the bolder chickadee style.

Also, they are less bold in color.  I didn’t know there were multiple types of chickadees when I first saw them, and the chestnut back stood out less to me than the charcoal color of the dark areas on their head.  It’s like somebody took a black-capped and turned down the contrast, then painted a cedar red strip on their back.  I initially assumed I was seeing a mutant black-capped, with low-key leucism.

Anyway, I think they look cuter than black-capped chickadees, but cuteness is not the main thing I like about chickadees.  It’s the sassy noises, and for that, black-capped chickadees win – enough to get a post of their own someday.

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A few weeks ago, my husband called my attention to a flock of birds flying around wildly, outside our window.  He said they must be the same birds that weirded him out when, upon waking, he thought he was seeing bats outside.  Now these birds were not flying at all similar to bats, but they were shading in that direction much more than bushtits or starlings – the other birds I see larger flocks of at times.

There was just an erratic, manic quality – no cooperation, just dashing around.  Starlings are like fighter jets, Bushtits are bouncy little paper airplanes, and they both like moving in the same direction as the squadron.  Not so much with these guys – pine siskins.  How else can I characterize them?

I don’t have much to say.  They’re streaky LBBs with a wee bit of yellow in the beige.  My husband thinks they look green.  Word is they sometimes flock with goldfinches, but I haven’t seen it.  They’re not unusual in the region but it is unusual for me to see a big flock so close. Kinda fun.

This post was boring so I’ll do another one today.

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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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Black-feathered harbingers of doom all look the same.  If you can tell crows from ravens at a distance, you’re sharper than I’ll ever be.  The only ways I can tell are by habits and vocalizations, and mostly the latter.

The first place I strongly suspect that I saw a raven, not a crow, was in Seattle, at a flophouse some penny-ante drug lord had briefly tricked my family into renting, surrounded by seven foot tall, no doubt tick infested grass.  Me and my siblings were feral monkeys entertained by nonsense, pushing our feet at each other’s faces and saying “stinkyfoot, stinkyfoot,” out on the porch.  Suddenly a sing-song voice from the top of a very tall utility pole sang it back to us.  Quoth the raven, “stinkyfoot stinkyfoot heeheeheehee.”  It must have said it at least twice, because I recall looking straight at the bird – it must have gotten our attention.

It’s possible that was a crow.  They can mimic; they’re much more common in the city.  But they are usually not that good at mimicry.

Not that ravens are spot on either.  I might have saved ravenposting for another day, but for the first time I’ve been able to definitively ID one in Federal Way, in the parking lot of the WinCo, just last Friday.  It was the voice.  Ravens have a big, echoing, throaty voice.  What was the call?  I don’t know if it was part of the usual raven repertoire, but to me it sounded very much like the world’s worst impression of a crow.

I still wasn’t 100% sure it wasn’t the world’s most raveny sounding crow, until I saw it flying away – mobbed by crows!  There were even more chasing this raven than I’d usually see chasing birds of prey, and it was only a little bit larger than they were.  I may not be able to tell ravens from crows, but the birds themselves have no trouble with that at all.

(off topic, the same day I may have glimpsed a slightly leucistic crow, grey instead of black, but it was hard to be 100% sure in driveby.)

I only saw definitely ID’d ravens as an adult for the first time this last October, on my honeymoon to the Olympic Peninsula, which is why their voices were still fresh in my mind.  They have a pretty crowish lifestyle to go with their crowish looks.  They have smaller groups, are more likely to fly solo, are larger (barely), and have a much wider variety of vocalizations.

Crows elsewhere in the world might be much smaller than ravens in those places, more easy to tell apart.  I speak from Pacific Northwest USA experience.  Both species have a lot of individual variation, and I have no doubt that here the very largest crow may be larger than the very smallest raven.  But when you see the mobbing, it’s clear enough who’s who.  It’s also an opportunity to see how ravens are just that little bit better at soaring flight, with fewer wing strokes.

They avoid cities and suburbs where crows dominate, because crows treat them very badly.  I wonder that ravens might prefer higher altitudes, because I saw them the most as I was close to mountains, but probably not.  I know they can be found in a lot of different biomes, from US Southwestern desert to the northern island of Hokkaido, Japan.  Ravens get around.  Like ospreys, barn owls, barn swallows, and peregrine falcons, this is a “cosmopolitan” bird, found across much of the world.

Back when Karl of Linne was still giving pretentious Latin names to everybody, they’d be considered the same species over the whole range.  But these days, genetic work is helping tease out subspecies and “cryptic” species, nested within larger populations, and I don’t know where ravens stand in that regard at the moment.  Humans only spread around the world about 1200 generations ago?  Something like that.  In a similar space of time, ravens have had 10,000 generations, so likely to have speciated more than we have, one would imagine.

On the honeymoon we stayed at a cabin-esque thing by a lake in the woods.  In the evening, the ravens would make a call like the world’s biggest bullfrog.  Not super far off from the call of a great blue heron, as I think about it.  But at least one time we witnessed the bird making the noise, so I’m pretty sure on that one.  Their day time call is a little less booming but still froggy, and they do all sorts of weird variants and mimicry as well.  I’m glad they’re still able to make some kind of room for themselves in a crow’s world.  Nice to see somebody other than the usual corvids on occasion.

What kinda raven stories do you have?

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Shorebirds, or charadriiformes, are birds that like shores.  The end.  Wait, no, they may have evolved in and prefer shores, but some get farther afield.  Seagulls are the most familiar, but little brown sandpipery things are also familiar to most of us.  Hard to identify and incredibly diverse at that.  Seagulls stray pretty far from shore, crisscrossing the continent to eat garbage.  Also found inland are killdeers.

Killdeers are more of those little brown sandpipery things.  They have bold black and white horizontal striping on their head and neck, but it doesn’t look at all bold from fifteen feet away.  Instead it serves to break up their shape, make them very hard to see.  Effective camouflage, which is why you see it on everything from badgers to nuthatches.  They have a big blood red eye, but still, nice looking little birds.

They sing “killdeer, killdeer, killdeer,” and I feel like I’ve only ever heard them do that song when in flight?  They live in scrubby fields, nesting in tall grass.  Unfortunately, fields get mowed, so they probably face a lot of tragedies.  Sometimes they’ll live in a parking lot, where grass grows in the cracks at the edges, and again, if a new tenant decides to make something proper of the location, bye-bye killdeers.

I used to see them in the abandoned lot across the street from the Federal Way Transit Center, but that field was converted into a well manicured park, and I haven’t seen them there since.  I saw one on a little trail by the WinCo in Federal Way, and I’ve seen them near a shore up by the Canadian border, on a bird watching trip.  I’ve heard them before dawn or after dusk near my old workplace in Auburn and even in my apartment complex in Federal Way.  Would not be surprised to hear them by my condo, tho I haven’t yet.

For all that, they’re still not a very common sighting for me – now.  I used to see huge flocks of them, a long time ago, when I had no idea what they were.  Auburn is a town cut in half by a big wide train yard.  Just a few over- and under- passes get you past those tracks.  They’re hopping these days, but when I was young, back in the 1990s, they were less busy, less well maintained.  The yard had little activity and little security.  When walking home from a friend’s house at three in the morning, or from watching a movie at the mall, I would sometimes walk along A Street by that train yard, or walk across it.  And there were so many killdeers there.

I can ID them years after the fact because I remembered their call.  They’d run around on the ground or take flight in fear of me, or stray breezes, or just for fun.  I didn’t understand what they were doing; still don’t.  Before I saw them running, I’d even thought are those bats?  Is the killdeer call echolocation?  I could only see them in the distance, drab and flappy.  I didn’t know much of anything back then.

Anyway, next time you’re in an abandoned parking lot or crappy gravel pit or funky field, anywhere USA, if you see a lil brown shorebird flap and killdeer away, pay your respects.

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In honor of folksy affable war criminals, welcome to a post on known unknowns.  Not the most known unknown, as Triple Six Mafia once called themselves.  The birds I’ve seen but haven’t ID’d.  Not the ones I don’t care about, like figuring out which flavor of samey seagull I just saw, but ones that have gotten my goat.  My goat can get got.

Of course, there are the white birds in tight formation streaking along 320th in Federal Way WA just east of I-5, that I’ve mentioned in posts and comments.  Still no idea who they are, tho leaning toward a fairly small gull species.  But I won’t bore you with that one today.  Instead…

That Thrush Tho.  Swainson’s?  Hermit?  One time at West Hylebos Wetlands Park in Federal Way the trees were filled with these drab nothing-ass thrushes.  I remember them being more grey, like hermit thrushes, but swainson’s are much more commonly seen, and it’s less cringe to assume you saw the more common of the possible IDs.  Strangely, there were dozens on one trip, and zero any other time I’ve been.  Passing through, maybe.

The Swarm.  Where I used to work in Auburn, one random day the sky over a particular field was full of birds, behaving very weirdly.  I’ve never seen anything exactly like it before or since, and I couldn’t ID them.  I assume they were some form of North American blackbird, probably brewer’s, which I’ve seen at a walmart parking lot not far from there.  But they were all centered over this one field about five hundred feet per side, ignoring all the adjacent fields and parking lots they could have used, flying forty to seventy feet up, just zooming around each other yelling, nonstop.  Mating season?  Hellifino.

The Cormorants.  When I lived in Seattle near the Ballard Bridge, I’d take the bus up and down Nickerson Street, where in the winter I could see dozens of black cormorants perched in a bare tree next to the water.  They looked like vultures; real cool.  But were they brandt’s or pelagic?  Binches are basically identical except some tiny details in the eyes or whatever.

Again, if you’re a Washington bird person familiar with those neighborhoods who has experience with the same beasts to narrow it down for me, holler.  Otherwise, the sheistiness continues.

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In the Pacific Northwest of the USA, it’s mostly true that most of our birds are drab as hell.  You want a red-ass red bird, you gotta head east of the mountains.  The Puget Sound isn’t where color goes to die, but it’s close.  It’s where color goes to take a restless nap under fungus-hued clouds.  The famous red on a migratory thrush‘s breast is fine.  It can look good under the right light.  Nothing on a cardinal tho.

The american robin’s cousin the varied thrush is easily the fanciest thrush in Washington, with more than a red breast.  It’s streaked with black and orange, like a local oriole wannabe (less bright than that bird of course; gotta stay grunge).  I’ve seen them on my porch, seen ’em in a tree, back at the old apartment complex.  Doubt I’ll see them at my new home.  In all, fewer than five sightings.  When I look them up on the web, it is said they are “common.”  Not in my experience.

I know nothing about them except that they are thrushes, they look cool, and I felt lucky to see them.  I often struggle to remember their name, wanting to call them “painted thrushes” for some reason.  What do you know about varied thrushes?

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