Friday, January 14, 2011

cold snap brings in variety

 With temps hovering at -24 to -26 for the last four days we have had non-stop guests at the seed feeder.  The black-capped chickadees come either singly, in twos and threes and once in a while about ten at a time. The bonus with the cold temps is we are getting a couple of boreal chickadee at the feeder, though they tend to come real early and again late when the light is waning making a clear shot difficult.
Black-capped  Chickadee

Boreal Chickadee

During our summer camping birding trip I managed to capture a mountain chickadee and a chestnut-backed chickadee. The difference between each can be clearly seen.
 Mountain Chickadee

Chestnut-backed Chickadee

2 comments:

Red said...

Do you have any house finches? Most of my feeder action is with house finches. I see the odd boreal and the RB nuthatch is a regular. I think quite a few RB nuthatches are in the area. The mountain chickadees are a little messy looking compared to the neat BC chickadees.

john said...

It looks like where you live is even colder than my part of Alaska. We are having overnight lows of -15 to -20f. The daytime temps are about 10 degrees warmer.
The Mountain Chickadees I used to see in Arizona had bold white eyebrows. That field mark does not really show in your photo.