365Caws is now in its 14th year of publication, and was originally intended to end after 365 days. It has sometimes been difficult for me to find new material, particularly during the winter months, but now as I enter my own twilight years, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to provide daily posts. It is my hope that along the way I may have inspired someone to a greater curiosity about the natural world. If so, I can rest, content in the knowledge that my work here has been done.
Thursday, August 13, 2020
The Anna's Tree
Day 304: The larger of my two Sitka mountain-ash trees shall forevermore be known as the Anna's Tree. I have never had Anna's hummingbirds in my yard, but that is what I have concluded these are (juveniles) after careful examination of multiple photos and observing them as they hover at the hardy fuchsias. There is no evidence of rufous colouration on the tails, and they are definitely "dingy grey-green" on their tummies. I first noted them while I was riding my exercise bike about a week ago. Something just didn't look right about them. "Huh," I said aloud, "that doesn't look like a Rufous. Could it...nah, must be the light." I couldn't get a clear view at the time with the sun in my eyes, but when they perched on the mountain-ash, another observation filtered its way up from my subconscious: the green feathers on their backs had a different tonal quality, bluish, but so subtly different that again, it might have been a deception of the light. Their behaviour was different, too. The Rufouses perch in the contorted filbert or dart in among the leaves of the Japanese maple. These little buggers stick exclusively to the mountain-ash, and there are...well, maybe not millions, but there must be at least ten, all of which go from fuchsia to tree repeatedly, sometimes with three or four perched in the tree almost shoulder-to-shoulder. Admittedly, I fudged this photo a bit to have both of them in focus by stacking two images, but this was the view through the lens. I've moved the feeder to hang just above the fuchsias, immediately outside my front window. Hopefully, I'll get an even closer look once theiy figure out where it is.
Labels:
Anna's Hummingbird,
Calypte anna,
juvenile,
Sitka Mountain-ash
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