Our birds list – Our Habitat Garden

We have lots of bird visitors. Some are around all the time; some visit only during migration. The first few years after creating our habitat garden, we’d see “new” (to us) species.

For the last few years, though, we don’t often have surprise visits, but we enjoy our familiar visitors — all, that is, except the grackles, starlings, and house sparrows.

It’s hard to get good photos of birds. They’re just too quick. I hope to get some good photos during the coming years, but our catalog shows some of the birds I’ve been able to capture in some form or other.

About this catalog

This isn’t necessarily a complete list of the birds that have visited our yard — only the ones I have managed to get a photo of or have a comment about. I’m pretty sure about the identification of most of the birds, but if I’ve made any bird ID errors, please contact me at info@ourhabitatgarden.org.

This catalog may look like the birds are listed in random order. They’re not in alphabetical order (and the common names wouldn’t be used in that case anyway), but rather in (kind of) taxonomic order, since that’s what I use in community science projects.

How to interpret our charts

When you click on each page, you’ll see a description of birds we’ve seen in our yard, each followed by a table. Here’s what the symbols in the tables mean:

Blank space: We weren’t able to count birds that month
Dot: We observed birds that month, but didn’t see that particular species
Number: The number of that species we saw that month BUT only at one time. In other words, if we saw one cardinal, for example, at 9 am, then another one at 10 am, we count it only as one individual since it could be the same bird seen each time. So we can consider each entry to be conservative estimates of birds seen — at LEAST as many as the number indicates (although I think it’s generally unlikely there were a lot more than the number indicated).

Our birds

These are the birds we’ve seen in our yard. Click on each page for more information about each species and some stats on often we observed them in our yard — from 2001 on — so it’s interesting to see patterns as our habitat and bird populations have evolved! Of course, these numbers are also sometimes affected by our opportunity to observe or not observe some months.

Page 1: Herons, Ducks, Hawks (except for doves, this group is not very numerous)