Three Red Birds

SINCE Winter's begun, we've been spending more time at the window watching our bird feeders. I managed to catch a photo of three red birds together - a cardinal, woodpecker and towhee (albeit a lousy photo through the screened window). The towhee's the black blob in the middle. Here's a list of all the visitors we've seen so far:

• Brown-headed nuthatch


• Carolina chickadee


• American goldfinch


• Carolina wren


• White-breasted nuthatch


• Dark-eyed junco


• House finch


• White-throated sparrow


• Eastern towhee


• Northern cardinal


• Red-bellied woodpecker


• Mourning dove

We also frequently see American robins, Northern mockingbirds, brown thrashers, blue jays, American crows and an occasional flock of common grackles in other parts of the garden.

Thanks to Common Birds of Atlanta by Jim Wilson and Anselm Atkins for help identifying these. If you're new to birdwatching, I highly recommend a region-specific field guide. It makes it so much easier than wading through pages and pages of 'LBJs' (little brown jobs) only to find the one you've finally settled on only lives on the other side of the country. This particular book is also ordered by size of bird, which I find much more useful than colour or other means of categorisation.

Emma and I were noticing how many seeds fall or are purposely dropped on the ground when birds are at the feeder. When I asked her what she was doing the other day at dinner, sorting part of her food off her plate, she replied that she was eating like the birds: "not yummy, yummy, not yummy, yummy".