Birdwatching

This morning, Cheryl went along on a guided bird watch walk in Weaverville's small but beautiful nature park. The guide was led by a locally famous birder who pointed out this is a great time of year for bird watching as many species who don't live in our area migrate through. It was very foggy this morning so although we heard many birds, we only saw most of them in silhouette. But we did see a Tennessee warbler, one of those migrants.


In the photo above, our guide Simon is making some bird-like sounds - not songs or calls - to bring out more activity.

After the walk, Simon had a bird slide show and passed out materials about how to attract more birds to your backyard. Since we have had many goldfinches and hummingbirds, supplemented by cardinals, doves, titmice, wrens, and nuthatches, maybe we should not be greedy, but we hope to see chickadees and juncos this winter and could possibly improve on our seed offerings to encourage their visits.

Simon told us that the rule of thumb on hummingbirds is, you can triple the number you are seeing to get an accurate count of the number using your feeders. That would mean we were feeding about 36 hummingbirds this summer - no wonder they were using 4-5 pounds of sugar every week and we were refilling our three feeders three times a day.