Well, it turned out that our one adult bird was actually two adult birds, plus at least one chick.
When I came home from work this evening, I managed to catch a glimpse of a gaping mouth, craning upwards out of the nest. Soon afterwards, either the mother or the father showed up and perched in a tree above me, so I made myself scarce indoors. I plugged in the trusty digital camera and set about trying to photograph the parent. Unfortunately, it’s a small bird and was too far away, so the shots were pretty useless.
Eventually, the parent decided the coast was clear and headed down to the nest. It appeared to have something in its beak, probably food.
A short while later, the other parent turned up and landed on top of the fence. He or she was carrying what looked like a small worm in its beak. Sure enough, it, too, made its way down to the nest. Sarah had arrived home by this point, and she managed to grab a shot of it on the fence, while I peered at it through the binoculars.
The photo isn’t great, because the bird was darting around and made a difficult target on which to focus, but it’s probably good enough for a decent ornithologist to be able to identify the little fellow. It appears in cropped form below.
So; is it, in fact, a Junco?
Dark-eyed Junco.
You’re right, not much meat on those birds. We obviously arent dumping enough steroids into the ground.
I plucked my copy of the Audubon Society Field Guide to Birds in the Western Region from my bookcase – which is generally not much use to me in Amsterdam!!! – and looked up your bird.
The beak is unclear in the foto, but it looks like it could very well be a ‘Dark-eyed “Gray-headed” Junco’.
Groetjes, Jo