BANNER MOUNTAIN GIRL#21

Pairs of birds

grackles, mourning doves, blue jays and redbirds

These colorful birds visit my yard often. The birds that I remember when I was a child at Banner Mountain were not the same as these.  They were mockingbirds, hummingbirds, sparrows, crows, hawks, owls and purple martins. My older siblings often told the story of how they would go look at a bird’s nest in an old tree. They said it was the nest of a “yellow-hammer” and it was built in an old “snag,” which meant it was in an old hollow tree. But I have no idea what kind of bird it was. My siblings went every day to see the baby birds. By researching, I’ve learned the yellowhammer is Alabama’s state bird, which is a northern flicker or yellow-shafted flicker. Or as one source says, they were birds with yellow patches under their wings. I can only imagine how beautiful those birds and baby birds must have been. I wish I could have seen them but they lived in the old snag tree before I was born. And to this day, I have not seen a yellowhammer bird. ~~Freeda Baker Nichols

mourning doves

grackles

redbirds

blue jays