There are many small birds living in our wooded areas. Many are “LBJs”, as in “Little Brown Jobs”! Only when you love birding do you start to sort out all the sparrows, finches, warblers, etc. in this group.

To make things worse there are quite a few “Little Green Jobs”, (LGJs), too. Or to be precise “little greeny-yellow jobs”, but multiple acronyms get cumbersome, so I’ll stay with LGJs!

Included in this group are Ruby-Crowned and Golden-Crowned Kinglets. These lovely little guys are smaller than a wren, shy, not very common, hard to spot and even harder to photograph because they never stop fidgeting!

So what a pleasant surprise to be standing by a marsh and spot a Ruby-Crowned Kinglet flitting through the grass. I finally managed to get a so-so picture. I then turned around and there was a Golden-Crowned Kinglet doing the same thing!

Kinglets are insectivorous, eating small eggs, insects and spiders with occasional seeds and berries. They can survive -40 winter apparently, so our current cold spell is like, “meh”, to them!

Other birding articles by Colin Rankin that you may enjoy:
Wildlife in Antarctica – a Photographer’s Dream! (Penguins)
What Makes The Falkland Islands Worth Visiting? (Albatross, penguins, caracaras)
Costa Rica – Finding your Inner Bird!
A Cluster of Buntings (Lasuli and Snow Buntings)
A Pleasant Surprise (The Cape May Warbler)
Birding Rio Lagartos (Mexico Birds)
“Keepers” – what makes a great photo?
Even More LBJ’s – The Bewick’s Wren (Little Brown Jobs)
Puffins (Newfoundland)
Hey! That’s My Fish! (Ospreys in British Columbias)
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