I got yelled at this morning.
Getting yelled at is not unusual. I usually do get yelled at.
The bird feeder (niger seed & black sunflower) is hanging from a branch of the only tree big enough to support it (apricot), and when I work back there the diners tell me I'm not wanted. The white-breasted nuthatch screams at me for quite a while before deciding I've had enough reprimand, the chickadees scold, the downy yells from a distance, the blue jays just yell. The house sparrows (someone should tell them they don't like black sunflower) cheep to each other, and the juncos fly away and mutter to themselves.
This morning a Cooper's flew in and yelled at me.
It's the territorial call Coopers make around the nest, the one I call the woodpecker call, the one I spent ages with a Birding by Ear CD trying to determine which woodpecker had that sound, & didn't figure it out until I saw a Cooper's call it.
This morning's bird made this call quite a bit from at least 3 different perches, so I guess I wasn't the only one getting yelled at.
I had a month of no Coopers from dispersal early in August until the morning of 17 September, when one innocently sitting in a tree newly dead this year was buzzed by a flicker (who then flew to a different perch and, yes, yelled). I wasn't sure if this hawk was a migrant, but I've seen Coopers in the same perch nearly daily after that, just as the sky is lightening in the morning, so I suspect not migration but a roost. One day (October 10) I had two Coopers in the same tree, one adult and one immature. The immature did not stick around long! And one of them (probably the adult) gave the woodpecker territorial call, the first I'd heard it outside nesting season.
Goldfinch: I don't see many although I've heard them, but last Sunday afternoon there were 3 in their brown fall plumage, in the seedheads of the Canada goldenrod and New England aster.
My backyard forms part of Lithuania ravine, 2nd block north of High Park, west of Keele.
