I don’t know what kind they are. The mother is a larger songbird-frame bird, with a grey back and a dull yellow belly. She flies kind of oddly, with her wings sort of cupped and fluttering. I’ve seen more birds like her, and they all fly like that. They’re really agile and can hover well, but they aren’t fast across open air. I can’t remember ever seeing them before, and I would remember that flight pattern, but they’re all over the place, always in pairs, this year.
The nest was clinging to the side of the tree. You can see a lot of webbing in the photo- I think that’s either webworm (tent caterpillar) webbing or spider webbing, and it was worked all into the nest. I’d imagine “builds its nest out of webbing and sticks it to a tree trunk” is a pretty distinctive bird thing.
@lookatthisbabybird and general @birdblr, anyone wanna take a stab at IDing? Googling and those “find that bird” websites haven’t gotten me anywhere so far. I’m in Central Texas, and sometimes we get birds that are supposed to only live in Mexico, so it could be some of them came up from there.
Dennis Hlynsky, a film and animation professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, creates videos at the intersection of art and science. Hlynsky transforms ordinary footage of birds and insects into ethereal illustrations by digitally tracing the paths they travel.
Hlynsky’s work is typically featured in galleries, where the video is projected on large screens with recorded sound. To see more videos from Hlynsky, please visit his Vimeo channel.
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