This One's for the Birds
The Juncos who visit Donna’s backyard feeder are pretty quiet compared to some of the other birds. The little pine siskins are noisy, active, even vicious to each other and the other birds. The Juncos tend to hang out away from the feeder, happy to pick up discards from the other birds.
I often see them on the railing near the feeder, as above. They don’t have the most colorful feathering, but they are lovely birds—all the more so for their quiet sociability.
We get quite a few purple finches at the feeders. Most of them look mostly red, although this one has a nice touch of reddish-purple. Or purplish red, maybe?
They are medium sized birds, larger than the juncos, much larger than the pine siskins. They eat calmly, and although they may give a dive-bombing siskin a glance, they won’t give up their perch easily.
This one put on a regal pose; mostly they just come to chow down and don’t stay too long.
The house finches are the steady customers at the feeders. Their behavior is similar to the red finches. This one is calmly cracking open a seed. All of the seed-eating birds have very agile tongues—they can manipulate a seed very quickly and get the good part out of it remarkably fast.
All of these photos were made with the Sony A1 and an adapted 500mm Canon FD lens. I used a Sony 1.4x magnifier to zoom in as close as possible, for an effective focal length of 700mm.
(The Sony adapter shouldn’t work with other brands of lens, but if anything, it makes the 500mm even sharper.)
The detail in the reflections in the eye of the first one are exquisite!