About Sparrows and Swallows in Nabia

This post is About sparrows and swallows and other birds in Nabia. It must be that I do not have that modern chip to walk all day with the mobile ready to take photos and videos or because we let them live in freedom at home and so they fly fast and do not stop.

The truth is that, in the end, it is very difficult to photograph the birds of Nabia.

Those who follow us on Instagram may have read the little story – not yet resolved – between sparrows and swallows. I tell you…

One about Sparrows and Swallows

In Nabia we have a few swallow nests, protected with a small wooden board underneath.

One day there was a chubby sparrow and his colleague flying around the swallows’ nests area, standing on the wooden board… in and out of the swallow nest.

“I warned” that there would be trouble when the swallows returned…

And it happened. The swallows sent emissaries – or that was my feeling – to check the state of their nests after their temporary migration.

And the chubby sparrow buddy was inside the nest when the swallow came back!

Now we have sparrows and swallows circling the same nests and I’m afraid my ignorance about ornithology doesn’t allow me to know how all this will end!

As I was saying, I was lucky to get these two pictures, because I usually can’t shoot any of the hundreds of funny scenes I see.

Especially in the mornings, when they seem to play in and out of the hedges of photinias as if they were playing hide and seek.

The Robbins

Some of the most elusive birds were the robins, it seemed that they smelled it and every time I managed to focus them with the mobile, they disappeared.

So much so that I could only photograph one through the service gate screen, although I had finally obtained proof of its existence in Nabia!

Needless to say, the day a robin took a proper bath in a garden pond I didn’t get there in time to film it, and I’m sorry, because it was a divine scene.

What at last I caught, although not yet in good quality, is to the rascal who has decided to stain – and well, not a little, no, well stained – all the rear-view mirrors of the cars in the parking lot of Nabia

And you know the worst? It’s called “Laundress”! No honor to its name…

There are also others, the coal bird, who are like sparrows, but with the breast yellow chick and who have a very particular and beautiful song and fame of being the smartest birds

There are more “classist” birds, which do not usually leave the lawn area of the garden and which, despite their distinctive plumage and crest, have the denominator of “common” … hoopoes.

Although I’m starting to think, now that spring has awaken flies and mosquitos, is that in a certain way, all birds in Nabia are “classist”… I can’t understand why flies seem to be very under in their list of tasty food… and they leave us, the humans, all the hard work of killing with fly swatters…

On this thing of calling a bird as “common” it is possible I’ll write someday, not only by the common Hoopoe that has nothing common, but by the handicap that the term implies for sparrows

Sparrows may be omnipresent, but I tell you that “common” have nothing. I will document these reasons for another post…

The more “peculiar” ones

And the truth is that here does not end the list of curious birds in Nabia… Just a single day, but I clearly saw a woodpecker trying to nest in an oak. I don’t know if he didn’t like the tree or whatever, but I never saw him again.

¡Last news! Just before publishing this post and in my aviary’ morning, I heard and recorded a curious sound, like the one made by the storks clapping with their picks, and it turned out to be the woodpecker! He hadn’t left, he’d just moved from tree to one closer to the Valley Suite…

The blackbird is another bird that also shares a running zone in the photinias, and you see the males running from one to another, very black and with their peaks well yellow, so different from the female blackbirds that are brown and more concealed…

A little beyond the photinias, more by the area of the orchard, is where you can usually see the starlings and magpies.