Kaiserstuhl and Birds

Today I stopped by a bookstore in town and picked up a 1.50 Euro guide to birds in the Kaiserstuhl region.

If we hop into our time machine, I'll take you back to last summer, where I spent my lunches either reading Rolling Stone magazines in the lunch room or eating outside and watching birds. The warehouse backed right into the woods, which meant there was always some wonderful interaction with Mother Nature somewhere, whether it was wasps building nests on the windows, snakes in the basement, or spiders in someone's cubicle. In my corner of the warehouse we had a bird that would spend the better part of its day pecking at its reflection in the mirror windows outside. So, I spent a lot of time watching birds at work, is what I'm saying.

Fast forward to today. Mary got a little net full of birdseed for me for Christmas and I plopped it out on my windowsill, since there's no place to really hang it. It sat there for several months until some little finches figured out that it was food and then devoured it in several weeks. They're yellow, blue, black, and white and in general it was driving me nuts that I could only identify the ravens, pigeons, magpies, and woodpeckers, which are all also found in the USA.

Unfortunately, wikipedia and the Internet in general were failing me, so I turned to the good old-fashioned printed stuff. They've got the English and French names listed as well.

So far I've seen:
Ringeltaube/Wood pigeon
Buntspecht/Great spotted woodpecker
Elster/Magpie
Blaumeise/Blue tit
Amsel/Blackbird
Buchfink/Chaffinch

and likely others. I still can't identify the raptors I saw at the Hochburg. Red/brown back with a white belly and a tail that's white and black stripped on the bottom. ::shrugs::