February23, 2012. Playa Royale, Mexico. Birding.

I am not a birder but I like to watch the birds.  Sitting on our balcony, we see the little birds as they fly in to pick up crumbs left from our sunset food.  Most birds who visit the balcony  are sparrows, beautiful little birds that I think are House Sparrows.

This season a much smaller bird has been a regular visitor to our seventh floor balcony.  I have yet to identify this tiny bird, despite the fact that I have three books of birds.   Gill decided to put out crackers to entice them to come more often, so every day, more crackers were crumbled up and placed on the outside ledge.  Of course, Gill and I sat and watched them every morning while eating breakfast outside.  And we poured through my inferior books.

Gill looked up birds on the Internet and finally decided that what we were looking at was a yellow breasted warbler.  Pat, our birder friend suggested that warblers did not normally visit balconies to eat cracker crumbs, so we were probably wrong.  At first I thought it was a wren, then a stripe headed tanager, but this bird is small.  This bird has a grey back, white stripe back from the eyes, about the size of your thumb with pretty white markings on the edge of the wing.

I can see why people get involved with birds.  Gill and I spent hours discussing this bird and Gill took many pictures.  We hope one will turn out well.  In the meantime, we need one of our birder friends tell us the name of this lovely little bird.   We actually have no clue.