Saturday, February 26, 2011

House Finch & Sparrow

We welcome our new guests - House Finch and Sparrow. Cindy and I enjoy watching them using our feeders at our back yard.

Couple videos to share - taken this morning while I was working on the garden... The red head is an adult male house finch.. female house finches has brown back and streak fronts..


At one time, there was a full house on the feeders....






Some facts about House finch... Source from allaboutbirds.com

Keys to identification 

Finches
Finches
  • Size & Shape

    House Finches are small-bodied finches with fairly large beaks and somewhat long, flat heads. The wings are short, making the tail seem long by comparison. Many finches have distinctly notched tails, but the House Finch has a relatively shallow notch in its tail.
  • Color Pattern

    Adult males are rosy red around the face and upper breast, with streaky brown back, belly and tail. In flight, the red rump is conspicuous. Adult females aren’t red; they are plain grayish-brown with thick, blurry streaks and an indistinctly marked face.
  • Behavior

    House Finches are gregarious birds that collect at feeders or perch high in nearby trees. When they’re not at feeders, they feed on the ground, on weed stalks, or in trees. They move fairly slowly and sit still as they shell seeds by crushing them with rapid bites. Flight is bouncy, like many finches.
  • Habitat

    House Finches frequent city parks, backyards, urban centers, farms, and forest edges across the continent. In the western U.S., you’ll also find House Finches in their native habitats of deserts, grassland, chaparral, and open woods
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Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Tulips are growing...

We wrote about our Tulips planting experiment in our previous post.
Couple weeks ago, we had few days of hard freeze in Houston.. We are glad that our Tulips survived this crazy cold temperature!!
Now they are growing.... Some pictures to share below:






Here comes the Tulip Tailo...be the 1st to bloom...