Our feeder area is now populated "ten to one" Pine Siskin, with flight
school and how-to-be-a-Siskin school in high session, which has caused
me to ponder the question of What one calls a large gathering?

I thought of these:

A Circus of Siskins

A Silliness of Siskins

A Plethora of Pine Siskins

A Surge of Siskins

A Surfeit of Siskins


One youngster Siskin sat on the crown of my baseball cap while I was
training the Nikon's lens on an outlier, a non Siskin Mob Member, a
Rufous hummer that was examining a Pale Swallowtail which was
systematically working columns of catmint blossoms a few feet from my
chair. Photographs done, I measured one blossom in images containing the
butterfly and also the hummer (separate photos) and discovered that the
wing spans were the same. Apparently Rufous was checking to see whether
Papilio eurymedon was a territorial intruder.