What is your favorite bird?

Talking with the family, we got onto the discussion of everyone's favorite bird.

I heard everything from cardinals to emus, which got me thinking... what is your favorite bird?

My favorite bird these days is the American Goldfinch



I always love seeing a flash of yellow fluttering around my sunflower patch during the day. They come back year after year!

Blue Jays, for sure! I have been encouraging them with peanuts for 3-4 years because I needed them to run the crows off. I love crows, but crows love my corn and that I can't have.

Well chickens are pretty high, and goldfinches are probably second. But my absolute favorite is the indigo bunting. Only seen it once in real life, but it was beautiful.

i absolutely couldn’t choose.

i’ve got a couple families of indigo buntings that live in the tall weeds of one of my ex-pastures. they’re great. i’ve been enjoying seeing the golden-crowned kinglet that comes to our little suet feeder periodically. but there’s so many more i love! the kingfishers, the eastern phoebes, the pileated woodpeckers, the carolina wrens, the blue herons, the barred and screech owls, the ospreys, the whippoorwills…and that’s just a few of the locals. bowerbirds! albatross! loons!

i really like animals in general. and i really like birds.

I do love how the pileated woodpeckers tell me which trees are infested with insects! And they're obviously quite personally charming too.

This is such a hard question. I love birds..

Hummingbirds are amazing and eat mosquitoes and come right up to me and look right in my face while hovering.

We have Canyon runs, and I love how they are upside down and sideways and running along the trees. They seem to be goofy.

I'm in love with the common robins. They're so brave around my dogs and they're just kind of a domesticated pet that I have around my property. They always appear when I have water running somewhere.

There's a kingfisher who thinks he owns the river and I can hear him from a quarter of a mile away, going up and down the river telling everyone that he owns it.

I've always really liked magpies, but I've come to kind of dislike having them around my property. They make a lot of noise.. and they're kind of bullies to the other birds and read their. They also have a terrible habit of spreading my dog poop all over the place.

I love ravens but they have such a long-term memory. Some kid 15 years before I lived here used to shoot at them with his airsoft gun and they never forgot. I have just started winning trust with them again.

I have some Blue Jays that are so incredibly brave around my cats. They have no fear.

Flickers are absolutely beautiful, but they're kind of dumb and they tend to always build Ness in my eaves of my shed and they always spook me when they fly out.

I have some turkeys in my area that get pushed down from the mountains when we get a lot of snow. They tend to stalk me so when I go on my nightly walks with my dogs the next day they'll be turkey tracks that have literally followed my old tracks in the snow. They're very curious. And I love watching them fly up to the top of the trees at night to sleep.., they're way more capable than I gave them credit for

I'd keep one as a pet if it weren't illegal to own a "native song bird".

so i live in bird paradise, essentially, with all kinds of colorful, noisy, curious birds. we have about twelve different kinds of tanagers, including bright blue ones, that hang out in my yard when there's fruit, along with a number of small parrots that fly in noisy bands, all kinds of owls and birds of prey, and several kinds of jays with the weirdest coloring you've ever seen.... but I think my favorite birds are still crows. So smart, so pretty. And I also really love buzzards, which are all over the place, and as mentioned above, if it weren't illegal and impractical, I'd have a bunch as pets. Maybe that could be my retirement project-- attract and pamper a bunch of buzzards...

It's hard to say . . . but the kookaburra is up there, they know all the best jokes if you go by their laughter, and at the other end of the scale the raven whose call is aark aark aaaaark - the last note on a falling scale - they sound so depressed.  However, top of the list is the Aussie magpie - they get a choir going, first thing in the morning to greet the day.

Seconding ravens.

Pileated woodpecker. I heard one pecking pin a tree nearby when I went out to feed the cats this morning. one of the most beautiful and majestic creatures I had ever seen with my own eyes. this one was a full 18 inches or more tall.
the first time I saw one I was sitting outside on the porch and it landed and started pecking on a rotted tree trunk about 15 feet away. what a sight! a memory that simply will not fade. one day I was out in the barn using an air powered impact tool and the woodpecker was responding to the sound.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC0DSZ8LcFU

Any type of woodpecker. The coolest thing I ever saw was a mother woodpecker hopping up and down the side of a pine tree with her 3 babies. Showing them how to find bugs. I was just sitting there with my mouth wide open! Pileated are probably my favorite, as a saw a couple others mention.

Hmmmm... it's really hard to choose between Owls and Hummingbirds. They are both awesome!

Jailbirds, because they are easier to catch than grouse. but you sacrifice a lot in the taste.

Loon.   One more piece of Minnesota I miss.

Pretty much all of the US central flyway geese, but Canada Goose a favorite.  As we ground-dwellers look from below, these amazing winged wonders escape the bitter north cold and yet arrive back early just to remind themselves of what winter is....yet knowing it's in the rear-view.


photo credit:  Three Rivers Park District, Plymouth, MN  --  https://www.threeriversparks.org/blog/how-canada-geese-went-absent-abundant-twin-cities

Kingfisher,  they look unreal.

I can't answer the titular question because I really love all the birds, but I have a bucket list item to befriend a crow. I definitely have a special place in my heart for crows.

I came close, as I was once on a walk with my youngest and happened to have some rainbow-colored goldfish crackers on me. I saw a crow poking around in a field maybe a hundred feet in front of us. I got its attention with some loud clicking noises, held up a cracker, and tossed it on the sidewalk nearby, then moved on and gave it some space. The crow hopped over and ate the cracker.

Next time we took that route, the crow was there waiting for us! Alas I didn't have any crackers. But I'm not too discouraged, I know that crow probably remembers my face.

BTW ever since I started watching Zefrank's (funny & mind-expanding) Youtube videos about various animals I picked up his hilarious habit of calling birds "byrrrds" and now I do it involuntarily: https://www.youtube.com/@zefrank

Hi John,

My pond is a stop over on their migration route.  My neighbor is a big time farmer, so there is always plenty of grain. My shelter pup learned it is really a bad idea to mess with them.

I agree wholeheartedly. I walk my dog Nugget along our local river trail just about every day. In the spring and summer, both sides of the path for about a mile are lined with flowering leaf cup. Goldfinches eat it, hide in it, and explode from it by the dozens when someone walks by, up on to the tree branches. I never tire of it!



An interesting thing I learned a couple of weeks ago is that goldfinches are not migratory. They actually change color to blend in with the winter scenery. They're still there, you just have to learn how to recognize them.

j

Timothy Norton wrote:Talking with the family, we got onto the discussion of everyone's favorite bird.

I heard everything from cardinals to emus, which got me thinking... what is your favorite bird?

My favorite bird these days is the American Goldfinch

(source)

I always love seeing a flash of yellow fluttering around my sunflower patch during the day. They come back year after year!