About feeders and chickadees

Chickadee perched on Karl's feeder. Karl Madsen/Yvonne Koenig photo

In a recent blog I got talking about Evening Grosbeaks and forgot to tell you about Karl's feeders. This is just one of a number scattered about their yard and each is more interesting than the last. All are made from recycled materials or scraps of wood from other projects and each is embellished with his trademark bent rusty nail.

As I said the other day, this is the feeder just outside their kitchen window right against the narrow deck along the side of the house. Their unique home is notched into the side of a steep hill. My favorite place to spend time is in a chair on this deck where I have choice of a close up view of visitors to the feeder, a mid-range view of activity in the Ponderosa pines or spruce across the driveway and a more distant view of activity on the valley floor - pheasants and killdeer, for example. The whitish space on the lower left of the photo is the neighbor's roof and beyond that (not visible) the railway track and road and then the pasture at the valley bottom.

On the wooden fence enclosing the courtyard outside their dining room, Karl has set  up special feeders that attract hordes of California Quail with the distinctive black comma jutting from their foreheads. They seem to prefer walking or running to flying and have their little trails all over the property.

I've seen two sparrows at this feeder that don't come to ours in Naicam - the White-crowned and the Golden-crowned. Our daughter-in-law calls the White-crowned the "bicycle helmet birds" for indeed their striped black and white heads do make them look like they are wearing bicycle helmets!

The chickadee perched on top of the feeder here is the Black-capped which is our usual visitor, too. A more occasional visitor at the Okanagan feeders is the Mountain Chickadee which has a white eyebrow separating its black cap from the black eyeline that looks like a mask.

The chickadee visiting Kristin and Peter's feeder when they lived in Kentucky was the Carolina Chickadee which looks very much like our Black-capped but lacks the white stripes on the wing. It also sounded different to my ear - as if it had a southern accent. It said chick-dah-dah-y'all.

I've seen the brown-capped Boreal Chickadees at Emma Lake and at my brother Alvin's near Olds, AB. So far I have not seen them here in Naicam.