Since we moved to our new home (in northern Illinois) we've been trying to attract birds to our backyard. The first few weeks we didn't see a single bird at our feeders. The first bird to visit was an American Goldfinch at the end of February. In the last 3 months we've seen 19 different species in our backyard. We now have eight feeders and a bird bath and it's busy every day. It's so much fun to sit outside and watch the birds. My favorite backyard birds are the Baltimore Orioles. We have some oranges out for them on our fence.

Male Baltimore Oriole

Here are some pictures of our backyard birds. Most of these pictures were made with our Wingscapes Birdcam:

House Finches

Common Grackle

Female Baltimore Oriole

Black-capped Chickadee

Northern Cardinal

Song Sparrow

Dark-eyed Junco

American Goldfinch

Northern Flicker

What is your favorite backyard bird?

We've been getting more and more birds at our backyard feeders since we moved here in February. Yesterday morning we were delighted to see our first Baltimore Oriole!! He was hanging around all day and he's back today singing his heart out in our backyard. He's probably trying to find a mate to show off our awesome grape jelly that he found. ;) Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to get a good picture of this beautiful bird at our feeder, but it looks something like this:

We recently moved into a new home in a village north of Chicago (before this we lived in the Netherlands). One of the first things we did after moving in was set up some bird feeders in our backyard. The area we live in is quite urban and in the first two weeks we didn't see many birds at all, except for some crows and starlings flying by. That changed a week ago when a beautiful male Northern Cardinal was hanging out in the trees behind our fence. He was looking at the feeders, but they were actually not suitable (too small) for a cardinal. We had bought some bigger feeders a couple of days earlier but the ground was too hard to put them in. Shortly after that I saw some Dark-eyed Juncos (slate-colored) flying around, but again they weren't landing on the feeders. Then a little bit later we suddenly saw an American Goldfinch chowing down on seeds. Yah, that was our very first backyard bird here in our new home. :)

In the past week a lot of juncos have been coming and going. They are so cute, hopping around the ground looking for seeds. Unlike many other birds, the juncos prefer to eat on the ground. They don't care about all the fancy feeder equipment we bought and prefer to hop around below them. At the beginning they were very hesitant to go anywhere near our feeders and a few always kept watch from the trees as one was eating, but now the juncos are getting more comfortable and they are staying around for a while.

Today we had a new visitor to our yard, a Black-capped Chickadee. Two, actually! I know it's no big deal to get these juncos, goldfinches and chickadees in your backyard, but we're quite excited to finally have some after not seeing any for a couple of weeks. We're hoping that these guys will tell all their friends and we'll soon have lots of birds at our feeders. Which birds do you get in your backyard?

In the last few weeks we've been seeing a Rose-ringed Parakeet in our backyard here in the Netherlands. These birds are originally from tropical Africa and India but have established feral populations in a number of cities around the world, including London and some big Dutch cities. We hear them fly by our house quite often and sometimes we see them sitting high up in trees in our neighborhood. This was the best view we had of one since we saw them in India:

Here’s a picture of a young one that we saw behind the Taj Mahal in Agra when we visited India in 2006. It was so small it still had to grow into its ring:

The Rose-ringed Parakeet was one of the first parakeets we made into a Birdorable, because we had seen them on our holiday in India. Here's the Birdorable version of this adorable bird:

Since February we've been getting new visitors to our backyard: a pair of European Goldfinches. In the beginning just one came to feed from a bag of nuts we have hung up in a tree. After a few days he brought his mate along and since then they've come by almost every day:

These birds are quite common here in the Netherlands but we never had one in our backyard before. This brings the total number of birds that have visited us here to twelve: Goldfinch, Chaffinch, Jackdaw, Black Bird, Great Tit, Blue Tit, House Sparrow, Collared Dove, Herring Gull, Magpie, Robin and Starling. European Goldfinches are named 'Putter' or 'Distelvink' in Dutch. The latter translates as 'Thistle Finch' for it likes to eat small seeds like thistle seeds. What's funny is that we have a feeder full of thistle seeds in our backyard but we've never seen our two Goldfinches eat from it; they always go straight for the nuts! After seeing the cute Goldfinches in our yard we've added the species to this website.