Hi, I hope you're doing okay I'm hanging in there
I know it can be really challenging for people to access nature these days depending where you are in the world
So I wanted to share a little bit of my nature with you
I'm out it go pros on to my bird feeders to get some footage of the visitors to my yard
this is a
Chicagoland bird appreciation video and I hope it brings a smile to your face. Oh
Hey, look, it's Blue Jay. I really like Blue Jays we have them year-round here in Chicago
What an incoming black red winged blackbird?
Blue Jays have
reputation as being
boisterous and aggressive birds, but I think they just..
Display a lot of leadership potential and I think she could really rise up the corporate ladder someday
Yeah, yeah, keep it up with that go get him spirit. Oh
Here's a
European Starling, you can recognize them by their bright yellow bills in their cute little pink legs. They were thought to have been
largely introduced to the United States by the American acclimatization
Society which was a group founded in 1871 with the goal of bringing European species
to the United States for fun
That one didn't age so well
Nope who's this
Who's it gonna be? Oh, oh, it's an American Robin. Oh
There are pretty cute birds
We have them year-round here. You don't see him as often in the winter
They stay up higher in the trees. But in the springtime they start they start coming back down
Actually, I was um, I'm inspired
I'm inspired to sing a little song about the American Robin. This is to the tune of
American woman by the guess who?
Otherwise covered by Lenny Kravitz, but here's my here's my version. It's called American Robin
American Robin it's time to feed
American Robin here to eat my seed
Comes hanging around my yard
Looking for peanuts and blocks of lard
I got nothing better to do than spend my time getting footage of you now Robin
Come back to me
American Robin tweet tweet tweet. I kind of ran out of lyric ideas there. Oh,
This is a fun one, this is a female
Brown-headed cowbird and she's got to get her energy because she's about to rip somebody off
Brown-headed cowbird czar known as brood parasites
So after they mate and when she's ready to lay an egg is she's not gonna make her own nest
She's gonna find somebody else's nest and leave her baby in
There their nest and let some other species of bird raise her young when her young hatches
it's actually gonna kick out the other birds eggs and
Then these other birds are gonna be raised in a baby that doesn't even look like them and she's gonna be long gone
But I think she's pretty clever
So take that for what you will
Well, we got a couple of house finches here the one in the front and the one on the left are both they appear to
Be house finches. The one on the right is a house sparrow
I haven't have a hard time discerning house finches from purple finches, which are other finches that are red
They're not actually purple who said purple finches were purple. I don't know
My field guide says a purple finch looks like a sparrow dipped in raspberry juice
Well who figured that out?
And shoot beer, she is. It's a female downy
woodpecker the
smallest of North America's woodpeckers she is
Itty-bitty, she's only about 14 to 18 centimeters five-and-a-half to seven inches
She's just a little bird, but she's got a big attitude
They're pretty they're pretty resilient little birds. I
Think I could watch these all day long. She
Can lay down a pretty sick beat here. Let's just listen to her for a minute
Red-winged blackbirds, they're super cool Birds and also pretty territorial
We have red-winged blackbirds on museum campus and for the uninitiated
Who aren't paying attention early spring you might if you come visit us, you might get dive bombed by the red-winged blackbirds
They have a tendency to swoop down at your head. You got to be careful
Probably wouldn't hurt to make a note of that in the new hire orientation
You know heads up if you work here on Museum campus, you might you might have a close encounter with a red-winged blackbird
We have a male House Sparrow over here house sparrows don't get a lot of positive attention. They're kind of a scrappy
yeah, scrappy little brown and gray bird not terribly descript or flashy and
They like to spend a lot of time in dirty puddles and eatin garbage
But they're they're really well adapted and they're actually pretty clever birds. I was reading the Wikipedia article about their feeding behavior and
I thought it was kind of funny had said
They can perform complex tasks to obtain food such as opening automatic doors to enter supermarkets
So I just like to imagine the research scientist who spent some time scoping out some of these
Shoplifting house sparrows to write up a scientific article about that behavior in particular. It seems oddly specific
and a little incriminating to be honest with you, but but you know
How sparrows I like them sometimes during long winters. They're the only bird songs I hear for a while. So I'm pretty grateful
to have these little neighbors
And I give them all the food they want which probably is the reason why they keep coming back
But he's a cute little bird or a barb. Is he around a bird?
barb
orb, bird barb
All right
Oh
It's meal Cardinal. Oh, I'll never forget the first time
I saw Cardinal we don't have him out west where I grew up. So first one I saw I was about 22
I was visiting my sister in
Washington DC on a trip to the National Zoo and I looked up in a tree here was this beautiful
male Cardinal
And I didn't know it at the time
But he had pooped on me and I went to an interview to get into grad school and with bird poop on me
Anyway, they let me into grad school. So I guess it all worked out
Like man still has brains on it