SF Bird Club October Newsletter

Introduction

Welcome to the SF Bird club!

Thank you for registering! In total we had (17) responses. The most popular favorite bird was the bushtit.

favorite birds among members

Spotlight Bird: Bushtit (Psaltriparus minimus)

bushtit
I took this photo when I was living in San Jose a few years ago. Small flocks of bushtits used to swarm ground covering and this lemon tree outside my window.

The bushtit was the most popular registration response and so it will be this month's spotlight bird. These cute, plump little birds are chatty and active and can be spotted flying around in flocks of 10-40 birds. They can be found year-round in the San Francisco Bay Area and are present in many San Francisco parks. Most recently I spotted a small flock while hiking down Telegraph Hill with a fellow SF Bird Club member.

Fun Bushtit Facts:

  • Bushtits build quite impressive nests and in Spanish they call these birds sastrecillo which means little tailor! I've seen a bushtit nest in Salesforce Park on one of the monthly Wednesday morning bird walks so keep an eye out next time you're downtown.
  • Bushtits cuddle.
  • Bushtits are unusually tolerable of strays and other flock members.
  • Bushtits have male helpers in the nests and they help with raising the nestlings. I think it would be similar to growing up with with your parents and then also some uncles in the house.
  • Bushtits weigh about one fifth of an ounce. That means one bushtit weighs about the same as a nickel and four of them weigh about the same as a AA battery!
  • Bushtit males have darker, blackish eyes and females have lighter, goldish eyes.
Bushtit (Psaltriparus minimus)
Image by Cephas. Source: Sloane, S. A. (2001). Bushtit (Psaltriparus minimus), version 2.0. In The Birds of North America (A. F. Poole and F. B. Gill, Editors). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi-org.acces.bibl.ulaval.ca/10.2173/bna.598, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

October Bird Bingo Contest

Fall migration is under way! During the month of October we will be doing a friendly bird watching competition.

Below is our bingo board. Snap a pic of the different species of birds and once you make a bingo reply to this email with your filled out board and you can win a prize if you get a bingo first! There will also be another prize for fully completing the board.

Need some hints on where to find these birds? Check out iNaturalist or eBird and look at other user reported sightings!

empty bingo board
TODO: I'll fix the formatting on this and make it easier to fill out

Closeout

Keep an eye out for a followup regarding a birdwatching outing. Also I just bought sfbirdclub.org and sfbirdclub.com and might move the site over to one of those in the future. In a bit I'll set up some redirects to sfbirding.org and leave it at that.