You’ll have to pardon the poor photograph.  It was taken through a dirty kitchen window into a scene combining bright sunlight and deep shadow, an exposure nightmare without flash (never use flash through a dirty window), and the two birds depicted were there together for only enough time for one frame.  In other words, the opening photo was a grab shot.  But, hey, the camera was handy.

You’ll also have to forgive that I’ve written a column titled “Full Circle” for the second time in just a little over a year-- http://jimburnsphotos.com/pages/8-16-18.html.  It probably has something to do with aging, all faces begin looking familiar, all experiences keep repeating, or so it seems.  Or maybe it’s just the inexplicable magic of this birdwatching life that a Western Tanager and a Black-headed Grosbeak, the seminal species of that life, will now apparently show up annually in our yard during fall migration.

Last year the tanager, a male, appeared on August 10 followed two days later by the grosbeak, a female on August 12.  This year the birds, the tanager and the grosbeak, both female/immature male types, not only appeared on the same day, but magically came to our front yard fountain at the same time several times.  What would the odds be?  Somewhere the birding gods have researched our birding history, and somewhere they are smiling now!

This year’s tanager was bold, tired, and thirsty, hanging out for several days and visiting the water about once an hour from late morning until dusk, bullying the hummingbirds and lovebirds, drinking but never bathing.  The grosbeak, more heavily marked than last year’s, was a one-day-wonder, timid and skulky, and it too drank but never bathed.

The tanager would drop from the foliage of the olive tree, unannounced, directly onto the top of the “cone” which emits the water, command the fountain for up to a minute, and drink its fill with water bubbling up onto its lower belly and vent area, all the other birds having disappeared with its arrival.  Come to think of it, this may have been a “bath” of sorts, or at the very least a method of cooling off.  We never saw it except when it was “on” the water or on the lower basin with the grosbeak..

The grosbeak, by contrast, would lurk in plain sight on exposed but shadowed branches above the fountain, beginning in early afternoon, wary, head on a swivel, surveying the scene below where sparrows, Lesser Goldfinches, and the hummers and lovebirds were refreshing themselves.  Later rather than sooner it would decide the coast was clear, drop to the tall grass beneath the fountain, flip flutter up onto the water line feeding the fountain, then cautiously take a perch on the lower of the three basins to drink.  Though it hung with us all afternoon until dinner, we only saw it drink three times.

I happened to have camera in hand one of those times.  It joined the smaller birds at the lower bowl without spooking them, perhaps because it was slightly smaller and not as brightly plumaged as the tanager, and began drinking.  At that moment the tanager dropped onto the lip of the bowl, the only time we saw it anywhere but on the cone, and began to drink.  The other birds scattered but the grosbeak did not . . . for about ten seconds—just time for one shot.  The shots of the birds following the column were taken that same day, individually, not through dirty glass, but from the just ajar garage door.

Can’t wait for next year to see what the gods have in store for us.