Two new friends visited the feeders last week for the latest feeding frenzy.
The first is a rather bullying red-winged blackbird (My Audubon guide seemed to make this as a tri-color but it has not only the red, but the yellow band that pegs it as a red-winged. My birding friend helped me sort it out.) But our other guest I am absolutely sure I have pegged. It is the notorious Catbird!
A p r o n h e a d -- Lilly Green 
We have a lot of those catbirds.
🙂
Oh, yes, that’s a red-wing blackbird. and that’s definitely a bird-cat. Err… I mean cat-bird. 🙂
😀
Lovely Red-winged Blackbird you have there. That is a neat shot of it in flight.
http://www.audublog.org/?p=8109
If that other thing was seen on our property, we’d do our best to scare the 9-lives out of it, so it won’t come by again. People just dump their unwanteds out in the country. Since we began birding, we’ve come to like cats less and less. No feline will eat just mice.
My bird book tri-color looks like this. How in the world does one figure out what is red-winged and what is tri-color?
Since I do not know what guide you use, I won’t say anything bad about it. 🙂
Did you click on the link? I felt the photos and descriptions they gave were pretty good. Red-wingeds are more orangey-red, whereas Tri-colored is a deeper red. And the line under the red is white on a Tri-colored, and yellowish on a Red-winged. But then you could have faded Red-wingeds whose yellow is pretty white.
Now all you have to do is learn their songs… that is how we first were able to tell the difference between our Eastern and Western Meadowlarks. They were Middlelarks for the longest time.
The yellow mentioned in the article is helpful. My Audubon guide is often not clear.
That cat’s expression is classic!
😉
Love the cat.
I have never seen him before. He’s a beauty.
What a beautiful bird, I like the photo in flight showing the lovely flash of red.
Fun stuff!
Yes, I was happy to get that one.