In keeping with one of our theme songs, Everybody Eats When They Come To My House, we have lots of bird feeders in our backyard. We brag that we feed half the birds of Tierrasanta.
My particular favorites are the tiny wrens. They appear in a cloud and descend upon the tray feeders to nom. Unlike the sparrows and doves, the wrens happily eat together without fighting. They smash themselves into the feeder, wing-to-wing and chow down merrily. Here's what it looks like.
The flock is growing all the time. These days, the wren cloud must number more than 60.
It's a beautiful thing.
5 comments:
Are you sure those are wrens? All the wrens at the Cornell Bird Lab site have long, thin beaks, and most of them are practically spherical little birds that tend to stand with their tails sticking up in the air.
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/search/?q=wren
Your birds have short, sturdy beaks like I expect to see on grosbeaks or finches. Can't really find a good match, though. Probably because they are either female or immature.
"THOU DOTH QUESTION THE KING OF THE WREN FAIRE? GUARDS! SIEZE HIM!"
Two small chihuahua mixes rush at you and vigorously bark at your ankles before losing interest and wandering off.
"Hmm. That didn't work out the way I'd hoped. Oh well. Good guards are hard to find these days."
As for the wrens, I think these are the chappies: https://www.inaturalist.org/guide_taxa/34845
While the wrens in your link have approximately the right coloration, the head and beak shape is not at all similar.
I managed to extract a clear enough image from the video for Google Lens to get its teeth into, and one of the possibilities it suggested was the Scaly-Breasted Munia,
https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/scaly-breasted-munia
That one actually looks very close. The Audubon page says,
"Native to southern Asia, this small waxbill is a popular cagebird. Escapees from captivity have established wild populations in several parts of the world. The species is now widespread and common in coastal California, from San Jose to San Diego, and other local populations are established around Houston, Texas, at a few spots farther east along the Gulf Coast, and in southern Florida. Usually seen in flocks."
So, that would be why we weren't recoginizing it. It's a recently-introduced invasive species.
Hmm. Scaly-breasted MuniaFest doesn't have the same ring as a Wren Faire. Maybe it's that whole "scaly" thing. I think I'll keep referring to them as wrens to my neighbors, but you and I will know it's all a sham, kind of like the Chinese zoo that painted a pair of chow-chows black and white and claimed they were pandas. https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/china/panda-painted-dog-chinese-zoo-shanwei-b2617217.html
I freely concede that the "WrenFaire" pun is pretty good, and if we need to take some liberties with the actual name of the bird to make it work, so be it. After all, the painted chow-chows may not have actually been pandas, but they were cute, and isn't that why people want to see pandas anyway?
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