Beautiful Day for hummingbirds and goldfinches

"A beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day in the neighborhood, would you.....", well I think we all know the end to that little ditty. You could sing it out here today. The wind is cooling, the sounds are soothing, and the wildlife is active. The hummingbirds are really kicking it up today. Napolean (sp?), the powerbroker of our hummingbirds is really fending off all challengers. I call him Napolean because he is short hefty and very bossy. He has a unusually huge red throat, which denotes he is a male. I think of it like that fancy uniform Napolean is always pictured wearing, fancy garb to suit his position in life. He guards the hummingbird feeders and runs off any hungry visitors who come for a nip. It is actually very funny to watch because he acts like a soccor goalie, defending from all directions and with any means necessary to fend off challengers. He can fly up, down, backwards, sideways with wings flapping or the usual forward...and actually any direction he chooses. Hummingbirds do these moves at rocket speed. They are amazing little animals. My pictures are pretty lame due to my equipment, and the speed of the subjects. They are no match for my little camera. Here is the best I could do photographing the hummers.

The vee shaped blur to the right of the feeder is one of Napolean's victims fleeing attack. They dive and jive so fast that I cannot believe I was able to get this image at all. Sheer accident I guess.

Male Ruby throated hummingbird sitting on the feeder.  Females have no red throat. Their disproportionatly long beak goes down into a hole in the red dish to feed, just like drinking a shake from a straw.

Napolean flapping his wings while sitting on his perch.

There were quite a few American Goldfinches around today. They are so spectacularly beautiful.  I enjoy them immensely. For the most part they are gentle little souls who share food, feeders and trees peacefully. They sing beautiful songs while they visit and sit in our trees.   We have lots of volunteer sunflower plants this year. They seeded volunteered from the sunflower seeds we put out for the finches and other small birds. From these volunteers I have learned a bit about how goldfinches forage. As soon as the flower blooms the goldfinces are on the flowers. They love the top section for some reason. The finches pearch themselves at the top of the flower and start digging into the petals. I believe they eat them because I see them hanging out of their beak. We have also see them pull them out and drop them, it seems as if they are getting to a part of the flower that is lower on the the flower head, then they dig and chew. The birds obviously love the fresh sunflowers and their color completely camoflauges them while on the sunflower. This is surely not an accident of nature. It must be nature's way of protecting them while eating. I do have a few pictures of the goldfinches doing acrobatics on the flowers. They are below.

Two goldfinches supping side by side on two different sunflower heads. It is a beautiful site to see the bright yellow goldfinches on the bright yellow flower heads. Maybe the yellow flowerhead help their bodies create the yellow feather coloring? The bird on the left is hanging upside down inside the big flower head.

This sunflower is a gold finch picnic table. They carry sunflower seeds from the feeder to this flower to munch on them in private without the interference of other finches on the feeder. 

These birds almost always come in a pair of male and female. That often leads to a large group gathering couple by couple or family to clan. We end up with twelve or more colorful birds on the feeder and decorating the tree together. They are quite beautiful to watch and ponder, and when they begin to sing the pleasure grows expotentially.