With the holiday followed by a three-day trip, the Gardepro has been quietly gathering images for the past 11 days without my intervention. Which is what a trail camera is for. I have the 5D/70-200/motion trigger deployed this afternoon to get some better images, but the trail camera showed me what was happening while I was busy elsewhere. The bluebird fledglings are now out of the nest (wherever it is) and are showing up in my yard to use the small birdbath.
Also, an image of the flicker pair together has been captured, but it seems only one of them hops up on the birdbath at a time. In the fourth image below, the female is waiting for the male to finish. No comment. After that, a light-brown bird with which I am unfamiliar showed up in recent images. It is about the same size and has similar features as a robin, but my bird book doesn't show this as a color variation for a robin. Cornell's Lab of Ornithology is probably the pre-eminent source for bird information, and they have an Artificial Intelligence app that will identify birds from a photo. Everyone is worried about AI taking over the world, but Cornell's AI Merlin Photo ID app doesn't know what this is. Maybe some human at Cornell will take a look at it and send me an email.
The image below that most definitely is a robin, a fledgling. And below, another actual robin, hogging the whole bowl of the birdbath.
Finally, another birdbath hog, one of the two crows that monopolizes the bath for 30 minutes at a time. I think I finally figured out what they are doing. They drop the sunflower seeds into the water, then fish them out a while later. Maybe it softens them up. I'm going to stop stocking the nearby platform feeder for a while to give the bluebirds, flickers and robins a chance to enjoy the water. Those three species all eat insects and do not go after the seeds.
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