Goldfinches are found along hedgerows, wood margins, brushy fields, and flower gardens, especially where cosmos are growing.
Length 12 inches. It breeds throughout the United States west to Texas, Colorado, and Montana and in southern Canada and winters in the southern half of its breeding range.
This is a beautiful blackbird that is well known from its habit of congregating in city parks and nesting there year after year. Like other species which habitually assemble in large flocks, it is capable of inflicting damage on farm crops. It shares with crows and blue jays a habit of pillaging the nests of small birds, but it does much good by destroying garden pests, especially white grubs, weevils, grasshoppers, and caterpillars.
A small, dark heron common to all water areas, breeding in a combination of wooded or brush habitats and marshes. It is also found along the wooded margins of lakes and ponds. It often shows more blue than green and is easily confused with the little blue heron. Its flight appears crowlike at a distance, moving with slow, arched wing beats.
The most generously distributed of small herons, its series of “kucks” or its loud skyow can often be heard in areas near urban settlements.
It breeds from the Gulf of Mexico north to southern Canada and winters from Florida south.
This is the common large sea gull of much of our interior and coasts and a familiar urban bird; a gray mantled, black wing tipped gull seen in garbage dumps and harbors in all U.S. coastal cities. Oceans, bays, estuaries, beaches, fields, inland lakes, reservoirs and large streams ... all provide habitat for this inspirer of “Jonathan Livingstone Seagull.”
His free wheeling grace in the sky and his raucous yet lonely _kee-ow, ke-ow_ manage to bring beauty to even the most odoriferous city dump.
It breeds from the Arctic to the northern states and winters from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.
Perhaps the most citified of birds, this import’s incessant chattering, quarrelsome disposition, and abundance about human habitations distinguish it from our native sparrows. Actually, it is not a sparrow at all, but a weaver finch.
Almost universally condemned after its introduction into the United States, the house sparrow not only held its own, but increased in numbers and extended its range. It now occupies its own niche and is regarded with amusement and considerable affection in our inner cities.