Fun with Another Mystery Bird

 This weekend, the major festival in our area, the Spiediefest, is taking place in a Binghamton park.  Thus begins an August full of music and other festivals.

The Spiediefest is a festival celebrating our regional food (spiedies), hot air balloons, and music.  But this year I just wanted to avoid crowds and the hot (for us), sticky weather. 

What's a spiedie, you ask?  Find out here.

We aren't going this year but here are some memories of past years.

Their beautiful balloons

 But our community garden is in that same park, and we are only limited to certain hours during the festival.  But we got this picture of a bee on one of our zinnias before the park closed for the festival.

As for us, we took a walk on the Vestal Rail Trail.

Not too far into the walk, I saw a female American goldfinch picking apart a thistle flower that had gone to seed.  I couldn't get close, and my iPhone 13 Mini doesn't have a great zoom.   It is an olive green small bird a little to the right of the pink flower towards the left center.  I loved seeing it shred the spent flower, releasing little white parachutes and, I'm guessing, eating the attached seeds.

A little further along two giant black birds exploded from a tree and flew away,  crying.  These were about American crow sized but their cries were not "caw" cries but guttural, deep in the throat cries.  We believe they were common ravens but Merlin (a bird app) says they are not common where we live in the Southern Tier of New York.  We'd better study up on differences between American crows and common ravens.  (No pictures).

Finally, for any of my readers who are experienced birders, we have a mystery bird who has shown up twice in our yard this week, on July 31 and again August 2.

This small orange dish is meant to put a half orange in but it had sunflower seeds in it July 30

The first time we saw it it was hanging upside down from the left curled metal stretching and pecking at the pictured seedcake while a male Northern cardinal fed from a dish nearby. When the cardinal left the mystery bird went to the dish. My spouse took two pictures through a window, which are not good and won't help anyone except you can see the striped head (sort of) in the first picture above.

Mystery bird again perched on that small orange dish

I wish we had our Wild Birds Unlimited store to run to and ask.

What was distinctive to us were the stripes on the head, which reminded me of the head of certain sparrows but this bird seemed larger than a sparrow and, with my limited knowledge of birds, sparrows wouldn't feed that way, anyway. (Kindly correct me if I'm wrong but we do see white throated sparrows and song sparrows at certain times of year and they always seem to feed from the ground.)

We've tried to identify from Merlin and a Sibley guide but are having little luck.  Any educated guesses out there?

Thank you in advance.