We have had a spate of birds landing on our patio in the last few weeks. The northern cardinals and sparrows apart, there are many tiny birds I wish I knew names of. I call them warblers or chats depending on whether they have their tails up or down!! The ones we saw in summer or spring had brighter breasts of the mango yellow or sunset orange kind, but these have dull white and yellow breasts. Sometimes, we see small black birds flying past us quickly. That I can only recognize them by color and not their names or characteristics is beginning to bother me.

Today, we saw a small beautiful grey bird with a white breast and lovely greyish wings that had black dots on them. It had a distinctive crest on its head, which was so elegant. It was slightly larger than the birds that usually visit us and seemed to be in less hurry to get away. Again, name unknown.

I'm going to play with whatbird.com for a bit and see where that gets me.

I still can't find my DC birdbook, but I continue to learn more and more about winter birds in Northeast America.


-------------

Three seconds since writing this post, Tapi finds me my DC bird book. Baah! :D

Isn't Tapi awesome? Can enough be said about him? Is he for real? :D

The aforementioned grey bird is the Blue Jay (very unlike the bright blue one I saw in Dartmouth!).
The picture is from wikipedia, but would you believe me if I told the sunny view outside our apartment and the snow is exactly like in the picture?

Isn't this the loveliest bird you have seen? Can you now relate to the disappointment when I couldn't recognize it?

Now if I can learn to distinguish the chats from the warblers and so on...