Bird Update

A couple of weeks ago, Evelyn and I spotted this bird in our front yard.  Clearly it's a juvenile something, but we're not sure what kind of bird it is.  Our guess is a northern flicker - it looks like it will have a black necklace on its neck like the adults do.  Plus, it's in an area of the yard where we commonly see adult flickers eating bugs.

This next little guy, a brown creeper, is tough to photograph.  They are shy birds, so if a human is around, they won't be.  Lucky for us, we have one of its favorite trees less than six feet from our back window...and if we sit still, the brown creeper will stick around.  Creepers are always on the move, scooting up tree trunks to find bugs to eat, which is what makes it tricky to capture it with a camera.  We've seen creepers a couple of times, but this is the first (mostly) unblurry picture I got.

 The last time we saw hummingbirds was September 4th.  I think it's safe to say they have headed south for the winter.  So we girls did a little switch-a-roo with the feeders this morning.  We took down the nectar feeder and put up the suet feeder.  We didn't have any suet out this summer because grackles would attack it, and my suet cake would be gone in a matter of hours.  Hopefully the grackles have also gone elsewhere so we can have more cute birds, like this downy woodpecker, eating from the suet feeder.