another shot.
No white circle around the eye of this one like last year.

This post was edited by ruthz on Sat, Aug 16, 14 at 11:21

Those are beautiful. I wish we had more varieties of birds here, but it seems the grackles have run off so many of our birds. We use to have finches, house wrens, robins and many others that I can't think of right now. The sparrows are still here, but few in number. The grackles stay here year round. They visit around from out in the country to in town, but they never leave completely. I just hate it.

We have four feeders out and get a pretty good variety.
More finches and chickadees than anything else.
I especially like the more colorful ones.

ruth this one in particular is a Yellow Warbler. Thank you for sharing :)

I'm no bird expert, but I'm going with female Scarlet Tanager. Both Warblers and Tanagers are migrant, so enjoy them while you can! I don't know if male and female travel together, but you might be on the lookout for the bright scarlet male.

How pretty! I haven't seen any of those here. So far the grackles haven't reached us, but my mom says the same thing about grackles running off the birds in her neighborhood.

ugogran, close guess on the tanager. The bill of a tanager is more conical and a bit shorter whereas the warbler has a thinner all-purpose. You can also see the start of the chestnut colored streaking on the breast that the tanager doesn't have. The eye-ring is still present so it's either young, or female. Females don't have the breast streaking so it's a first year male. Another easy way to tell the difference in a lot of birds, and something often overlooked, is the color of the legs. My father is an ornithologist and he taught me as a little kid to always look at the legs! Tanagers have grey legs whereas the yellow warbler has pink to light olive legs.

Either one is quite welcome in our little corner of the planet :)

Grackles...ugh. Right now we have a boatload of immatures hanging around all the water features. They love to pull on any nearby plant and it drive me bonkers. But hey, at least they aren't starlings.

Beautiful!
I've seen unusual birds fly in with the big flocks of grackles.
I got a bag of mixed Special Finch food and a small metal feeder. This brought me more unusual birds and colors than ever.

We were very lucky this year and had Scott's Orioles here! Not sure they're still here, haven't seen them in the last few days. But I greatly enjoyed their lovely songs and watching them trying to balance themselves on the hummingbird feeder was very entertaining! They're very shy, so I'd watch them through the windows. So pretty!

Awesome. I'd love to see that one in my yard.

Thanks for Id for my yellow one.
I think we had different yellow ones last year.
More greenish color on the back and wings.
Maybe they will show up this year too.