This is sort of hard for me to grasp, but there are people who would like to keep orioles away from their hummingbird feeders. Can anyone offer advice on how to do that? Secondary question: what’s the best oriole feeder out there?
As soon as I sent out the birding report announcing the Birds and Brew gatherings, we realized there was a conflict with Bob Carroll’s Third Thursday field trips. So we’re changing Birds and Brew to every FIRST Thursday of the month. Our initial meeting will be Thursday, August 3rd, at 7 p.m. A map showing the location of First Magnitude Brewing is here, and the brewery’s “Visiting Us” page, with parking information, is here. Please join us. I’ve heard that all the cool kids will be there.
In other High Society news, the June Challenge party will take place on Saturday evening (that’s tomorrow) at 6 p.m. Details in first paragraph here: https://alachuaaudubon.org/2017/07/01/well-thats-that/
If you’ve got any good bird photos that you’d like to share, Alachua Audubon has a “Birding Photos” Flickr page that welcomes your contributions: https://www.flickr.com/groups/3599086@N23/pool/with/34779629775/ (Click on the link to see Erika Simons’s amazing photo of a Great Blue Heron with a young alligator dangling from its bill!)
A few other things that I noticed about the new AOU … sorry, AOS checklist upon further examination:
– Blue-winged Teal, Cinnamon Teal, and Northern Shoveler have seceded from the genus Anas, perhaps because they didn’t like the sound of it, and have gone into the genus Spatula. Traitors! (But ha ha! Spatula!)
– Gadwall, Eurasian Wigeon, and American Wigeon have also jumped ship from Anas and been recruited into the genus Mareca. Turncoats!
– The family Emberizidae used to be huge, containing New World warblers, tanagers, grosbeaks, buntings, sparrows, longspurs, and blackbirds, as well as Old World buntings. Over the years one group and then another have left the warm embrace of the Emberizidae and formed families of their own, until only the New World sparrows and Old World buntings remained. This checklist creates a new family, Passerellidae, for New World sparrows (including towhees and juncos), leaving only the Old World buntings – which are on the North American list only because they occasionally stray to the Aleutian Islands – as the last remaining members of Emberizidae. Good bye, emberizids! It was fun saying “emberizids” while it lasted!
– The sequence has been reshuffled almost as drastically as last year. The tail end of the North American bird list, as found in field guides, checklists, et cetera, formerly followed this order: warblers, tanagers (including grosbeaks and buntings), sparrows (including longspurs), blackbirds, and finches. Now it goes like this: finches, longspurs, sparrows, Yellow-breasted Chat, blackbirds, warblers, and tanagers (including grosbeaks and buntings). And the sequence of blackbirds is, as my Army son would say, ALL jacked up, what with the new division into five subfamilies.
– You can see the Alachua County bird list in its new sequence and with all the taxonomic appurtenances here.
So … what about those hummingbird / oriole questions? Any ideas?