Time of sit: 7:45-8:05pm
Spent another evening just post sunset. Birds were a bit more vocal this evening. I could easily hear many gulls south of me on the beach near Totem Park. They were more vocal than yesterday and I wondered if perhaps some herring were getting stranded on the outgoing tide.
A robin was singing for a good chunk of the time I was sitting. I could hear it to the northwest, further away and in a different direction than the one singing last night. I could not say whether it was the same bird or not. One thing I did notice was the singing seemed more mellow without the strident sort of angry sounding tone and cadence that I was hearing last night. It occurred to me that it could be the greater distance, or perhaps there was some sort of resonance/harsh echoes that were coloring my perception of the bird last night, or it may have just been a particularly aggressive feeling robin.
There was some activity in the Song Sparrow hedge across the drive. I first noticed a single bird feeding close to the southeast side of the hedge for a brief period of time. Shortly after I noticed it, it returned its cover. It started to alarm (or at least that’s how I interpreted it), but not in a particularly strident fashion. After a few moments I could hear a second Song Sparrow giving the same chirping alarm call down the hill south of me. The alarms went on for a couple minutes or so, I think – though I didn’t time them. When they stopped alarming I noticed a couple of Bald Eagles that had been sitting close together in the tops of Western Hemlocks (Tsuga heterophylla) were gone. I had neither heard nor seen them take off, so was not sure when it happened, but I wondered if that’s what had prompted the feeding Song Sparrow to return to the hedge and follow up with a bit of an alarm.
Later there were a couple of Song Sparrows doing a little chasing around the hedge. I saw one fly off to the northwest of the hedge, and another do a longer loop. I think there may have been three different sparrows, but I only ever saw two at a time, so I’m not positive.