Tag: bird watching

Saw What Might Be a Red-tail Hawk in Our Back Yard

We saw some kind of raptor today in our back yard and I couldn’t tell for sure if it was a Red-tail hawk or not. I got the video with an old Canon point-and-shoot through a window at 7:45 in the morning and she sky was overcast. It had a dark spot below its eye, mostly white breast feathers. The back feathers looked mostly brownish. It didn’t look like it had been banded.

It looked like its left foot might have been injured. It looked almost black. It held its left leg up most of the time while perched in a tree, but lowered it so it could scratch its face with the right foot. It’s blurry but you can see its left foot starting at the about 44:15 mark in the video.

I checked a couple of websites with photos of common Iowa raptors, but this bird doesn’t seem to closely resemble any of them.

That Pecking Robin is Back Again!

A couple of days ago, last year’s pesky female robin came back to peck at one of the basement windows. It’s a window well and she looks like she might be bringing next materials to it. She’s also beating at the window with her wings, as though she sees her reflection—despite the window film Sena applied to it.

I’m pretty sure this is the same robin who twisted her head around backward, Exorcist style, to stare balefully at me last spring.

She does this during the day. They sleep at night, thank goodness. But at the crack of dawn, she’s out quixotically pecking and flapping at the windows like they’re windmills.

We’re also on the lookout for the house finch pair. They seem to be scouting the covered back porch fan as a likely spot for a nest.

Thoughts on House Finches

This morning, I got a snapshot of a male house finch sitting on the back porch fence post. He’s a proud looking fellow. I saw the female a minute earlier but could not catch a picture of her.

It’s spring; they’re probably a mating pair and we saw them last year. So, there will soon be eggs somewhere out in the woods past our back yard. There will probably be chicks soon.

Maybe the chicks will survive. I remember during the month of May in 2019, I was keeping watch on a nest of house finches just outside of my office window. I would go out every day to a skinny little juniper tree, part the branches, and snap pictures of the eggs and later, the squirming hatchlings.

One day, I heard a noise like the flapping of big sheets outside my window. When I finally looked out, I saw the biggest crow I’d ever seen, just taking off with all of the nestlings clenched in its beak.

The mother house finch arrived minutes later and searched frantically for her chicks for over half an hour.

It wasn’t until then that I learned I was at fault for exposing the hiding place of the nest in the tree. I went there daily and spread the branches, probably while the crow watched me from high above in the sky.

I thought I learned my lesson, but I didn’t. In May of 2024, a mating pair of house finches built a nest in our artificial Christmas tree right on our front porch, a step away from the front door. The ruddy male would feed the female, who had laid 4 eggs.

I set up a critter cam on a tripod and filmed them for days. Every time I hustled out there to get the camera to download the videos, I scared the birds off. We watched for 17 days. The typical time to hatching is about 14 days. I finally tossed the whole thing out in the back yard.

There are a red tail hawks, turkey vultures, and crows all over the sky. I hope the house finches know better than to build a nest in any of the big pots on our porch. I know better than to draw attention to them now.

First Sight of Robins Today!

I caught sight of a couple of robins today and managed to get a fair snapshot of one. They’re casing our back yard for nesting sites. I’m also wondering if they’ll attack their reflections in our windows now that Sena covered them with plastic overlays last year.

So far, they sit high up in the trees-and they just eyeball me.

Pelicans on Parade!

The weather was superb yesterday and we visited our favorite walking trail out at Terry Trueblood Recreation Area—along with a lot of people who had the same idea. It was around 60 degrees and not a cloud in the azure blue sky.

The highlight was the big flocks of white birds with black markings under the wings sailing over Sand Lake. Observers we encountered had different opinions about what species they were.

At first, I thought they were pelicans, which are frequent visitors at the park. On the other hand, a few thought they were storks and for a while I took their side. The further we walked and the more video I got, and the more people we talked with, the less sure we were about these very large white birds. Many people were very sure they were pelicans.

After we got home, I looked on the internet for education about how to tell the difference between storks and pelicans—and was convinced that the birds we saw were pelicans. I was able to enlarge a picture I pulled from one of my video clips which showed clearly the large bill.

I guess this is a good place for Dixon Lanier Merritt’s 1910 limerick about the pelican:

 “A wonderful bird is the Pelican.

His beak can hold more than his belly can.

He can hold in his beak

Enough food for a week!

But I’m darned if I know how the hellican!”

Despite the tall tales about storks bearing babies, the fact is their beaks are narrow.

So, this actually takes me back to the one person on our walk who was convinced that the large, wheeling birds were storks. She joked around about the idea a little and asked Sena if she knew the story about how Dumbo was born. It just so happened was lost on us because we’d never seen the 1941 Disney film Dumbo and it turns out that a stork brought Dumbo to the train dragging a car full of elephants, one of which was Mrs. Dumbo.

And there’s a very complicated explanation of the stork myth about them delivering babies to mothers—although not in their beaks but in a bundle.

Aside from the pelicans, we saw many signs of spring, including buds on the trees, the ice melting on Sand Lake, and people gazing at the sky-waiting for spring.

Saw a Banded Red-tailed Hawk in Our Back Yard!

I got a picture of a banded Red-tailed Hawk today in our back yard. It was pretty exciting. I can’t remember ever seeing one banded. I’ve gotten pictures of them occasionally, most recently before this in July, 2025. That one wasn’t banded.

I checked on the web for any reports of who might be tagging Red-tailed Hawks in Iowa. In recent months there have been a few sightings posted on social media sites. Other birds are being banded as well. There are people who are licensed by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to tag birds.

The Hitchcock Nature Center in Pottawattamie County is located in Honey Creek, Iowa, which is near Council Bluffs.

The Iowa Raptor Project is involved in conservation, education, and rehabilitation of birds of prey.

OK, until I saw this video, I admit I thought the snipe was an imaginary bird, an idea I got from the movie “Up.”

Starlings and More!

Sena got a video of a large flock of birds flying around in the outlot beyond our backyard. We thought they were all starlings, but I couldn’t focus enough on individual birds to tell for sure if there were other species mixed in with them. I couldn’t even confidently identify a starling although I’m pretty sure that’s what many of them were.

I think it’s not unusual for other small nondescript blackbirds to mingle with starlings. While we can’t make a case for the smallish flock being a murmuration, there was an impressive number of them. Trying to identify specific species by repeated attempts to focus and magnify using video editing software mostly led to my murmuring under my breath—mainly curses.

Starlings are often called pests and web sources say they are among several species of birds that spread disease. The Iowa State University Extension calls them “nuisance birds.”

My usual resource, Birds of Iowa Field Guide (2023 edition) by Stan Tekiela is a little more generous in the description of the European Starling, calling it a songbird which can mimic the songs of up to 20 species and can even imitate the sound of the human voice. Other web resources compare them to mockingbirds. Large flocks of starlings commonly mix with other blackbirds in the fall. Starlings were introduced to New York City in 1890-91 from Europe.

See if you can pick out the starlings in our video and other birds. I got mostly eyestrain from the effort.

A Flick on Fall Flickers

Today, as usual, we had to interrupt our cribbage game so Sena could capture video of all the birds in our backyard, the fall colors, and whatnot.

She caught some shots of Northern Flickers, which she has not seen before although I can remember catching them on camera years ago. They’re really strikingly colored birds and you can easily distinguish female from male birds.

The males have a black mark next to their bills which is called a mustache, which the females don’t have. They don’t migrate and you can see them all year round.

Sena was slinging the camera around and hurrying from window to window to get the best shots. She accidentally caught me on camera. I threw a still shot of it in the video just for laughs.

We saw a bird we didn’t recognize at first mostly because it was small and preening with its back to us. It had a red breast, so it was probably a young robin. Our luck, it’ll try to attack our windows next spring, although Sena put up some window film which may prevent that—we hope.

The fall colors are relaxing. The squirrel reminded me of Dug the dog in the Disney Pixar movie Up. I would have stuck a picture of Dug in the video but it’s copyrighted.

By the way, I won the cribbage game today. It happens.

Music Credit for YouTube video:

Carefree Melody by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Source: http://www.twinmusicom.org/song/302/carefree-melody

Artist: http://www.twinmusicom.org

Mourning Dove Toe Deformities Revisited

I recently got my first and only comment on a blog post I posted on March 30, 2019 about toeless mourning doves which were visiting our backyard deck of a house in which we lived previously. I also found an article published about the issue later that year in December of 2019, which is about pigeons losing toes. Pigeons and mourning doves are not exactly the same (although they are relatives within the same family), but apparently pigeons are thought by the authors of the article to lose their toes because of urban pollution.

The commenter is from West Texas who has seen toe deformities, notes that it’s a new problem to him (never saw it prior to this year), remarks that the toe deformities were visible in newly hatched birds and further suspects the problem is more complicated than exposure to stringfeet or frostbite injury.

When I searched the web for more information, what appeared is my 2019 blog post at or near the top of the page and little else. There was one news item about the issue published in 2021 suggesting the problem of missing toes in doves at that time was probably due to frostbite from a winter storm in North Texas.

We haven’t seen any mourning doves lately. They don’t frequent our new property, which is actually close to the same neighborhood where we observed the toeless birds several years ago.

So, the mystery deepens. If anyone has new information, let me know.

New reference:

Frédéric Jiguet, Linda Sunnen, Anne-Caroline Prévot, Karine Princé,

Urban pigeons losing toes due to human activities,

Biological Conservation,

Volume 240,

2019,

108241,

ISSN 0006-3207,

(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320719306901)

Abstract: Measuring the impacts of urban pollution on biodiversity is important to identify potential adaptations and mitigations needed for preserving wildlife even in city centers. Foot deformities are ubiquitous in urban pigeons. The reasons for these mutilations have been debated, as caused by frequenting a highly zoonotic environment, by chemical or mechanistic pigeon deterrents, or by necrosis following stringfeet. The latter would mean that pigeons frequenting pavements with more strings and hairs would be more exposed so subject to mutilations. We tested these hypotheses in Paris city (France), by recording the occurrence and extent of toe mutilations on samples of urban pigeons at 46 sites. We hypothesized that mutilations would be predicted by local overall environmental conditions, potentially related to local organic, noise or air pollutions, so gathered such environmental predictors of urban pollutions. We showed that mutilations do not concern recently fledged pigeons, and that their occurrence and frequency are not related to plumage darkness, a proxy of a pigeon’s sensitivity to infectious diseases. Toe mutilation was more frequent in city blocks with a higher degree of air and noise pollution, while it tended to increase with the density of hairdressers. In addition, the number of mutilation on injured pigeons was higher in more populated blocks, and tended to decrease with increasing greenspace density, and to increase with air pollution. Pollution and land cover changes thus seem to impact pigeon health through toe deformities, and increasing green spaces might benefit bird health in cities.

One sentence summary

Toe mutilation in urban pigeons is linked to human-induced pollution.

Keywords: Columba livia; Feral pigeon; Toe mutilation; Stringfeet; Urban pollution