30 posts
Blue jays are intelligent and well-known for their loud, raucous calls. In addition to their own sounds, blue jays often mimic the cry of hawks. Experts aren’t sure whether this is a warning that a hawk is in the area or a means of dispersing other birds from food
If you examine the maps in bird books, you’ll notice that many species of birds appear only in the eastern or western United States. This is because the country was divided in half by sheets of ice during the last Ice Age, and some species of birds evolved differently
The red-bellied woodpecker has already been sited
At a distance, common grackles look like large blackbirds and sound like a rusty door hinge. But up close, their yellow eyes are rather expressive and their feathers have an almost peacock-like iridescence. Grackles, like northern flickers, allow ants to crawl on their feathers and secrete formic acid, which helps
White-breasted nuthatches have large hind claws that help them creep headfirst down trees, searching the bark for insects. They may also be stashing seeds or insects under the bark for later, using moss or lichen to help hide their cache. Nuthatches were named for their practice of jamming nuts and
House finches have been becoming more prevalent in Kentucky in the past several decades after a few were brought from the southwestern United States and released on Long Island, New York in 1940. They quickly spread to all of the eastern states. Males look similar to purple finches but are
A male purple finch, in the words of naturalist Roger Tory Peterson, is a “sparrow dipped in raspberry juice.” While found in Kentucky, purple finches have become less common over the past decades as the population of house finches (next week’s feature) has grown. The National Audubon Society’s
As winter approaches, the tufted titmouse harvests the last berries of the season and transitions from a summer diet of primarily insects to a winter diet of primarily seeds. Common visitors to backyard birdfeeders, tufted titmice prefer sunflower seeds. They tend to choose one large seed and fly to a
Male mallards sport a variety of colors, most notably iridescent green heads. While the mottled brown female mallard is not as colorful, she does typically get the loudest say in the relationship, as quacking is the purview of the female mallards while male mallards make quieter rasping or rattling sounds
