Verdin
Verdin: Very small songbird with gray upperparts and pale gray underparts. Face and throat are dull yellow; eye-lines are dark. Wings are gray with red-brown shoulder patches. Black bill, legs and feet. It builds complex sphere-shaped nests using as many as two thousands small twigs.
● Song:
"tswee-swee, tswee", "tea-nip"
● Foraging & Feeding:
Verdin: Eats insects, their larvae and eggs, spiders, berries, and fruits; forages among twigs and leaves, sometimes hanging upside down like a chickadee or titmouse.
● Breeding & nesting:
Verdin: Three to six pale to blue green eggs with red brown speckles are laid in a nest made of sticks, leaves, and grass, held together with spider webs and cocoons, lined with grass, feathers, and plant down, and built from 2 to 20 feet above the ground in a shrubby tree, cactus, or bush. Eggs are incubated for 10 days by the female.
● Similar species:
Verdin: Lucy's Warbler resembles juvenile Verdin, but bill is thinner, dark, and without pink-yellow base. Bushtit has smaller, blunter bill and longer tail. Gnatcatchers have longer tails with black-and-white markings.
Flight Pattern
Somewhat weak fluttering flight with several fast shallow wing strokes followed by wings pulled in to sides, repeated. Flights often short duration, bush to bush.