I wondered if the people here have interesting birds living in their towns.  In the small town where I have lived for almost all of my life birds such as cardinals and finches have frequented the yards where people live. It is generally a bird friendly town. The flickers and downy woodpeckers are occasionally seen here although mainly in the spring and summer months. It is worth putting out bird feeders to attract the seed eating birds such as finches, chickadees, and native sparrows. I wonder if it is the nearby city parks which helps to maintain the bird population since they have more trees than suburban lawns.  The yards often have large trees which may offer considerable shelter and have a large bird population. I wish there were less house sparrows and starlings and more native birds. Usually the county parks have more native birds because they can offer more bird friendly habitat such as woods and other natural areas.  Robins will appear often in towns during the spring and summer months, but they can be found in the city parks and suburbs in all seasons of the year. 🙂

This is a wonderful video about the conservation of the wood thrush, my favorite songbird. 🙂

This is an interesting CD with the calls of loons. I remember seeing loons at the Seney National Wildlife Refuge in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan when we were on vacation there many years ago. 

Here is an interesting article about the wood thrush:

https://www.caroldoeringer.com/a-wood-thrush-story/?fbclid=IwAR0WqP__N0CBaJFaj_qXwb9afsJyGQKPkD7LUVkoiKM-NoWlb48pFTYKuHU_aem_AVxQSaItzCvweYHYSjzrSycgr71WR61WNvvo-7uESl67ISQuwt16xHTXStk6SrND0zM

The videos were apparently made in a forest in western Michigan, where I live, although no specific location is given. It is amazing footage of a wood thrush’s nest, and you can hear the wonderful flutelike song of the bird. The article and the videos are well worth viewing.  🙂

@Narnian78: I wondered if the people here interesting birds have living in their towns.

When the Blue Mountains escarpment & National Park begins on the other side of the Nepean River, we do get many birds around here. When it stops raining, there is a bird called the rainbird, whose call after a period of rain, is like an "all-clear". There are Australian magpies with a most musical "kyogle" sort of call. Australian ravens nesting around a local shopping centre, making “aaah—aaah—aaah—aaaaaaaah” noises, like disapproving great aunts. Last year, in March, we saw Rainbow lorikeets at the local school, whilst flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos, or pink and grey galahs screech to each other constantly. 

@waggawerewolf27 

We don’t have wild parrots here in Michigan, but there are many other beautiful birds such as cardinals, finches, and of course thrushes.  I guess there is an advantage in living in warmer or tropical countries in that parrots live there.  And we also have kingfishers,which I guess are also found in Australia. We also have woodpeckers in the forests which are very beautiful to look at. Not all species are found worldwide, but there often are similar species found in other countries. Every country has its own interesting bird life. 🙂

@Narnian78:  And we also have kingfishers, which I guess are also found in Australia. 

Yes, we do have a sort of kingfisher, the laughing kookaburra. I included a picture of one. We also have Barn owls, the Superb Owl and other raptors like eagle hawks, wedge tailed eagles, and ospreys. Your description of birds in Michigan sounds fascinating. But since Europeans arrived in Australia, we have introduced species like the Indian Mynah as well as the ubiquitous pigeons, turtle doves and others. The popularity of small birds like budgerigars means they are seldom, if ever, seen in the wild. 

I saw a beaver while I was birdwatching this morning in a county park about ten miles from where I live.  Of course it was not a talking beaver but an ordinary one going about its business about thirty feet away from me along the river. 🙂  I also heard the flutelike songs of wood thrushes, which was why I came to the park. Unfortunately, they didn’t come close enough for me to see them. I have seen them at other times in the park. It was a very nice walk with pleasant weather. 🙂

I have seen the slate colored juncos in the last couple of days.  They are on the ground near bird feeders at this time of the year where they feed on fallen thistle seed.  And they play in the snow when many other birds have flown south for the winter.  They are also known as “snow birds” because they like snow so much and are quite common here in winter.  I am not sure if a similar bird is found in other countries, but they are mainly here in the U. S. and Canada.

This is what the bird looks like:

https://www.google.com/gasearch?q=junco&source=sh/x/gs/m2/5#ebo=0

Slate colored and dark-eyed junco are two names for the same bird.

Posted by: @narnian78

I have seen the slate colored juncos in the last couple of days.  They are on the ground near bird feeders at this time of the year where they feed on fallen thistle seed.  And they play in the snow when many other birds have flown south for the winter.  They are also known as “snow birds” because they like snow so much and are quite common here in winter.

Oh, so that's the bird Anne Murray was singing about! (I always wondered.)

We don't have juncos in the UK / Europe, as far as I know — definitely not in Australia either. The British bird we most associate with snow, and especially with Christmas, is the robin. (The European robin, of course, which is the original bird to have the name — we have birds called robins in Australia, as you do in America, but all of those are a case of British colonials seeing birds that looked vaguely like the robins "back home" and being very unimaginative with what to call them. ) I think the Christmas connection is because robins here, like your juncos, don't migrate in winter and so they can be seen year-round, even in the coldest winter, and their red breast is a real splash of colour, especially in a snowy scene, so they often appear on Christmas cards.

And of course it was a robin who guided the Pevensies to find Mr Beaver in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — Peter describes them as "good birds in all the stories I've ever read." Perhaps one of the stories Lewis was thinking of specifically there could be The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, first published in 1911. I don't know if Lewis was familiar with it, but it does include a friendly robin that shows Mary, the young main character, where to find the door to the secret garden — and the chapter where that happens is even called "The Robin who Showed the Way"! 

@courtenay 

I always wondered why the American Robin was named after the European bird. They both have the red breast, but that is where the similarity ends. They are not even in the same family of birds. Our Robin is a thrush, and I think the European species is related to flycatchers, a completely different family of birds.  I guess the people who named our robin were not experts on birds. As for the European bird I wonder if it got its name from Robin Goodfellow, the other name for the fairy Puck in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Or maybe it was named after Robin Hood.  It would be interesting to know. 🙂

@narnian78 No, they're not closely related, and Australian robins are a different family of birds yet again. They're not even all red! The one that's common where I grew up is the Eastern Yellow Robin — grey back and brilliant yellow breast. Very pretty little bird.

I don't know if the name comes originally from Robin Goodfellow or any other specific source. As far as I've heard, thetraditional name for the bird is simply "redbreast", and at some point it started to be called "Robin Redbreast" as an affectionate nickname. Eventually just the name "Robin" stuck!

I think a similar thing happened with jackdaws, which are a member of the crow family — smaller than most other crows, and black with a slightly silvery patch on the back of the neck. I read somewhere that they were originally just called "daws", and the nickname "Jack Daw" became so common for them that it ended up as their official name, as one word. Possibly because their call sounds a bit like "Jack-Jack-Jack"! You'll recall a Talking Jackdaw has a comic role in The Magician's Nephew, so obviously C.S. Lewis liked them too. Maybe he felt a connection with them because his own preferred nickname was Jack?

Apparently American Robins are seen in the UK,  although the sightings are very rare:

https://www.birdguides.com/articles/rare-birds/rarity-finders-american-robin-in-east-sussex/

I always wondered how they fly across the Atlantic Ocean. Or are they carried by storms, which may disorient them?  It seems unlikely that they would be carried by ships since they would have to survive for a longer time aboard a vessel. They are called vagrant birds since they wander so far from their native habitat.  It is one of the mysteries of birds’ lives.

@narnian78 Yes, those would be what are called vagrants — I think they're usually blown across the ocean by storms. Very exciting for birdwatchers, but I feel sorry for the birds themselves when that happens — there they are, stuck in a totally unfamiliar habitat with no hope of ever getting home again, and even if they can find food and look after themselves well enough there to survive, they'll never find a mate or see others of their own kind again, which is sad. Well, I don't know how much the birds themselves feel sadness or loneliness exactly as we humans would, but they surely have feelings of some sort and I can only guess many of those vagrants wouldn't find it easy, living out the rest of their life alone in a strange place. 

Here is an interesting article about the “knocking” thrush in The Hobbit:

https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/62506-jrr-tolkien-s-knocking-thrush

I think the bird Tolkien had in mind was the song thrush of Europe, although it is very similar to the hermit and wood thrushes that we have here in the U. S.  Both birds are excellent singers and can be found in forest habitats.  🙂