Brill pics, Lynnie. What darlings! Mallards are our no.1 duck too. Your Herons look pretty much like ours. Hey do you get Bitterns? They're the oddest Herons.
I'll try and remember my camera more when I'm out and about to return the compliment. i could have got a great one of one of those Long Tailed Tits today climbing around newly bare branches where I was parked. He went upside down and one point and it was so very cute.

Got more pictures of local birds, all taken by myself recently.


An immature Glaucous Winged Gull, who was very tame, thus I managed to get very close to him.


Male and female Mallard Ducks, very, VERY common, to where they've started becoming better known as "domestic" ducks.


Great Blue Heron, looking for a meal in the Puget Sound.


A Bald Eagle, taken from a distance, but at least I got him. You can just see the white of his tail. Gorgeous birds, I love them. I love them all!

Funnily enough some British cities are having similar problems with Gulls who have adapted to artificial environments like the Pigeons, Crows and Starlings before them. Gulls, of course, are large birds and increasingly learning that they have the capacity to intimadate humans for food as well as scavenging which they're able to do all night thanks to street-lights. I like them. I think they're magnificent.

Intelligent crow story.

I was at a park a few months ago and was talking with the lady that runs the concession stand there. She was telling me how for over a week strait, she came into work and found trash all over the parking lot and the grounds. She thought some obnoxious kids had come into the park after hours and trashed the place, and was about to file a complaint after it had happened every day for a week. But then one day while she was getting ready for another day at work, she heard commotion behind the building, and so she went to check it out. There she found a flock of crows, attacking the trash bags that had been taken out the night before. They would actually work together to lift a trash bag up out of the trash bin, fly up a few meters and then drop it, which would usually result in the plastic bag bursting open and exposing the "goodies" inside. She watched them for a while, and soon saw another silly bird take on a smaller bag by dragging it on the ground until the plastic bag ripped. They would then fight over their findings, and eventually leave remnants all over the grounds. Ah hah, she had finally caught these "kids" red handed! Her colleagues got new trash bins with heavy lids, and it solved the problem. But my goodness, what naughty, yet intelligent birdies!

Your Ravens sound like our Ravens. Do they croak?
Yes Yes Yes tell me about your intelligent crows.
You're so lucky to have native Hummingbirds. We grow plants with flowers that are meant to be pollinated by them but no Hummers will ever come. ...

Sorry it's taken so long to get back. We have a lot of crows and ravens here, specifically the Common Crow, and the American Raven. I've always had trouble telling the two apart unless I see them side by side as they look so similar, raven's being the bigger of the two of course. So I mostly just look for the raven's wedge shaped tail when they're flying. Both are all black, although there is one species in the extreme southern part of the country and Mexico that has a tiny bit of white on its neck called the Chihuahuan Raven. And yes, they're highly intelligent birds. I know ravens can learn to talk like a parrot. And I've got a funny story concerning crows and their intelligence if you want to hear it.

Hummingbirds are so cute. It's easy to mistake them for a large fly or bee, they're so tiny. I like to think of them as living jewels, so many have glistening feathers. It's a rare sight to see one perched motionless, at least it is for me. They're quite plentiful here, mostly in damp climates. We have a lot here in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest with all the rain, and the flowers we have in the spring and summer. They're very cute little birdies.

I saw a Heron today! It was flying so lazily over the gardens, looking for ponds I'll wager. OK keeping up the ornithological exchange: What crows do you have there? I could spend a lot of time watching crows as they're quite intelligent are have their own little society. Do wish we have Hummingbirds though. Where do i find them in the States?

Oh yes, dunlins are very cute! We call them and similar birds "sandpipers" here. I love how they just skit across the sand so fast, their little legs are almost invisible. In the area I am now, we don't have many egrets, but we have a lot of herons. In the mid section of the country where I use to live, there are a lot of egrets though. They're soooo pretty during breeding season. Depending on the species, their bills and/or legs turn bright yellow, and their snow white feathers grow very long and "flowy". I miss seeing them. I'll settle for great blue herons though. They're such big and magnificent birds. I saw one just yesterday while taking a walk along a river, I'm always pleased to see one.

Yeh the Herons are brilliant. Isn't one of the Egrets that's found on every continent? We get Little Egrets in Britain now which are smaller than Herons are pure white. 20 years ago I'd have been knocked out to see one but now they're all over. Some of those shoreline wading birds they hang around with are really cute too when you see them up close. Do you have Knot or Dunlin or that sort of thing over there?

Diver, eh? Good name for them. They're around, but it's been years since I've seen one. I remember hearing their call when I was a girl. They are quite plentiful in the area I was living at the time. Mergansers are really cool too, they almost look like those prehistoric birds. They have teeth! But they also have some really pretty colors. Cormorants are very common. Swans... *sigh* Oh how I love swans. I saw a pair of what I believe were trumpeter swans a year ago as I drove to work. I believe they were migrating south from Canada. I was so excited to see them too! It had been a while since I had seen swans.

My favorite birds ever since I first found a love for them have always been the herons and cranes. Big birds always fascinated me, because if they were as big as I was and could fly, maybe I could find a way to fly too. That led to many a wonderful daydream.