An Outside Visitor

I had an unusual experience this morning.  A little bird came to sit on my windowsill, which is not so unusual in and of itself until you consider that my window is a dozen or so stories off the ground!  While I often see birds flying past, they rarely set down for a visit.  This little fellow sat there for several minutes and I inched closer and closer inside, in order to get a good look at him.  He sang me a bit of song and then flew merrily away.

It was the size of a sparrow and had similar markings on its body but a very red breast and cap on its head.  I described it to my boss when I got to work, as I know she is a bit of a birder, and she thought maybe it was a purple finch but when we looked up images on Google, that bird was almost all red in colour, "the bird that Roger Tory Peterson famously described as a “sparrow dipped in raspberry juice"".

The bird I saw was very red in two areas but not all over like the purple finch.  We then determined it was a house finch, which looks like this:

Male House Finch
Photo courtesy of wikipedia.org


Go here to All About Birds to read more about the house finch.

(More photos from the TBS Bag of Beads reveal tomorrow, I promise, I'm just too tuckered out tonight!)