Nutcases
I’m sorry. I have been neglecting my blog lately. But even more, I have been very neglectful of the “Birds” side of Birds and Baking, as I just checked and I’ve only had two posts in that category all year-long!
In real life, I am very much immersed in the bird side of things at the banding station. We’ve been having fairly busy days, ranging from 35 to 129 birds banded of now 61 species for the season. Often we are banding the same species over and over again– Orange-crowned warblers, Ruby-crowned kinglets, and White-throated sparrows were some of the higher numbers banded today. But every once in a while something a little more special shows up in the nets and someone gets a surprise when they pull a bird out of a bag back at the banding lab.
We’ve actually had one or more nuthatches per day for the last few days, but regardless, every time I find one in the net or take out of a birdbag they make me smile. They are cute, make cute noises, and as one friend pointed out to me a long time ago, they smell really good (like pine trees, from spending so much time pressed up against the bark.)
As I mentioned last year, I tend to come up with nicknames for birds, so lately I’ve been calling nuthatches “nutcases.”
Male Red-breasted nuthatch
He’s got a black crown.
Female Red-breasted nuthatch
She’s got a blue-gray crown.
If you want to see more bird photos, and have Instagram on your phone, you can follow me– “theOvenbird”. I am working on amassing the world’s largest Instagram bird-in-hand photo collection! 
Also, my four-day weekend is coming up, so look forward to some more posts soon!
Have you seen any good birds lately?
The ravens around here have been very busy lately. I keep thinking I wish I had a video camera on my phone so I could tape them and their funny noises. There is one guy who always sounds like a tap dripping, he likes to hang out by Boston Pizza (good dumpster diving there) and sometimes by the old Staples building. I saw a huge group of sparrows on Sunday that were all sitting on a chain link fence, it was very pretty.
I’ve been seeing some great birds during migration around here. I wish I had more time to get outside and watch them though! My hummingbirds are gone though, and I’m super sad about it.
must… find…. nuthatch… to smell…….
We had nuthatches pass through our area about a week ago, here in Elliot Lake.
That’s nice! There are quite a few in my neighbourhood here on Vancouver Island and I always enjoy hearing them.