Sounds exciting. Not as exciting as getting a good shot of a pileated woodpecker but pretty exciting. :)
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Sounds exciting. Not as exciting as getting a good shot of a pileated woodpecker but pretty exciting. :)
Been meaning to get photos of a yellow headed blackbird that hangs out around some local ponds. Wasn't doing a thing today so decided to just drive up and dedicate an hour or so to photograph the birds. Got a couple decent shots.
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I don't think I have ever seen one.
Beautiful bird.
What is the story on those shots?
I don’t see the horned owl out in the open much. He is usually buried in the trees and when he sees me gets nervous and takes off. I went out a couple times this summer looking for them and all I got was some hooting. I am in Oregon now Looking for birds. I see them but don’t seem to be able to get a decent picture. I will keep trying. I think I will go to Cannon Beach and look for a tufted puffin. I just read the big year. Good book.
I'm pretty sure this is a young owl, maybe born last winter. It's very light colored and the tail is not fully developed. We had a pair of owls nesting around here over the last few years and I suspect this is part of that crowd. We usually see it perched on a stump in my neighbor's yard or on his deck rail. But the morning I took those shots he was perched in our ghost juniper watching the collared doves....and me. Didn't stay for long, flew over onto our deck rail and then flew off into the junipers by the golf course. But it appears very healthy so must be a good hunter. A week or so ago I counted 9 spotted ground squirrels out there. Now I only see two.
I read this book and it said in the language of bears ground squirrel translates to meat in holes.
I watched a black bear dig into a ground squirrel hole over by Grand Junction one time. There was a lot of dirt flying.
My dog, may she test in peace, dug one out a few years ago. I got a video of it. Berryessa went over the spillway one night and the creek went from 50 cfs to 5000 or so overnight and flooded all the ground squirrels out. They went to high ground and dug new burrows. It was maybe a foot and a half in and she could smell that it was close. I did not know what she was doing but took a video and she came out with one and dispatched it. Quite a surprise to me. She was pleased with her kill.
We've had three hummingbirds hanging around most of the summer. One Anna's and two Rufous. The Rufous are smaller but seem to be able to dominate the Anna's most of the time.
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Our birds seem to come in waves. Lately we have a flush of house finches, some are really red (one even had me thinking it was a drab western tanager until I got a closer look). And now we have a bunch of lesser goldfinches. Their colors fade as the breeding cycle ends but they're still pretty little birds.
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This great horned owl was sitting in the ghost juniper in our backyard this evening. We think it's a different owl than that other one we've been seeing. This one is darker (front and back) and I think slightly larger. He let me walk across the lawn and passed him in the tree to get a couple photos, even closed his eyes and took a little nap. Then he opened one eye and I could hear him "Okay, slick, I see you and if you get any closer you'll regret it." I love these raptors.
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This great horned owl was sitting in the ghost juniper in our backyard this evening. We think it's a different owl than that other one we've been seeing. This one is darker (front and back) and I think slightly larger. He let me walk across the lawn and passed him in the tree to get a couple photos, even closed his eyes and took a little nap. Then he opened one eye and I could hear him "Okay, slick, I see you and if you get any closer you'll regret it." I love these raptors.
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You have him at eye level and you can move around to get the background you like. That is a pretty good photo op for a horned owl. I saw one in Mexico in a palm tree. Hooded orioles were going crazy in the tree and in the process of looking at them I realized I was looking right at a horned owl. Quite a surprise.
The scrub jays are our alert mechanism here. Anytime you hear a raucous group of scrub jays it's 90% of the time because they're mobbing a hawk or owl who happened to perch in their territory.
PS: Sorry for the double post. The site is acting a little screwing lately, especially when posting photos. It often routes me to a 404 error message, but if I try it a second time it works, slowly, but it works.
I'm glad to hear that other folks are having the same kind of problem with the site. Mine has been acting up for a long time and seems to be getting worse, That 404 comes up all the time, and then later it seems to work at a snails pace.
The western scrubjays (and most of the other songbirds for that matter) don't like the owls and hawks hanging around. But sometimes they aren't real sure what to do about it.
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That owl is right out in the open. They are usually buried in the trees but that one is right out there begging to get his photo taken.
It is funny how birds just yell in each other faces. They don’t hold back on expressing their dislike of others. If there were birds on this message board they would get booted off all the time for saying nasty things.
I saw a couple condors last weekend at Pinnacles. They were soaring about 800 feet above the campground. We hiked up over the top of the Pinnacles looking for them but saw only vultures. Fortunately the condors were nice enough to soar by our campsite and give us a look. There are only 300 condors flying around in the world. They were down to 30 in 1983 when they caught them all and started captive breeding. Lead poisoning accounts for half of their deaths. They live 60 to 70 years if they don’t eat a carcass shot with lead. One gram of ingested lead will kill a condor.
He was out there again yesterday evening.Quote:
Originally Posted by John H
That's cool. I helped build the condor aviary up in the Pinnacles back in 2000 or there abouts. They approached large companies for volunteer work crews. We had to schlep all the materials and tools up to the aviary on foot. It was July and around 100F midday. We had to dig by hand, cut wood by hand, etc, no power tools allowed. We had to stand six large poles to support the retention nets. We had to dig a ditch 3 ft deep around the complete perimeter so we could bury the galvanized wire fence. If we didn't, the wild hogs would dig under the fence to get at the carrion they fed the condors with. The aviary is used to acclimate the condors and get them to imprint on the Pinnacles area so they didn't wander off and get into trouble elsewhere. They invited us to come up when they released the condors but I was travelling for work and missed it.
Sadly, I have no photos of this amazing event I witnessed this week.
I was standing on my driveway at the front of my garage talking with a fishing buddy.
Like an F-18 fight on a strafing run, a Ball Eagle came down and scooped up a squirrel from my street.
It pulled up from the dive at a high rate of speed and was gone, that fast.
It was a shocking event for me.
We do have lots of birds of prey in Florida because 85% of the state is still undeveloped land.
Very cool thing to see Bill. Bald eagles are mostly scavengers so pretty cool to see one snatch a squirrel like that.
Well, we are not sure if the squirrel was alive or a roadkill.
Hope the hurricane didn't effect you too badly.
The hurricane went up the West side or Gulf side of Florida and we are on the East side so we got a little wind and rain.
I guess it has been terrible for the southeast with lots of serious flooding.
Hurricanes can make landfall from Texas to New York.
I always think of Cardinals as eastern birds...which is why I was shocked when I saw them in Baja.
I didn't know they ranged all the way down there either. Here's the distribution map for Northern Cardinals from Cornell Ornithology and it does indicate they range onto Baja.Quote:
Originally Posted by Woodman
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The very closely related Pyrrhuloxia is also in the SW USA and northern Mexico and Baja. While it looks the same size and shape, it's never all-over red. Can be mistaken for female northern cardinals though.
Learned something new today so I can zone out now.
A couple shots from a Mexico trip last week.
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Stupid HUrricane Milton blew us off the water on day 2 and muddied up the water for quite a ways so we had to make some long runs to find clean water. Still managed some snook, bonefish, permit, snappers for ceviche. I don't know if anyone landed a tarpon tho. They were sticking pretty far back in the mangroves. As a group I think we boated something around 14-15 permit, no big ones tho.
This Cooper's Hawk perched in our ghost juniper out back for quite awhile this morning. I snuck out the back doo but when I got to the corner of the house he got nervous and took off a few moments later. Still managed a couple decent shots.
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Sharp red eye on that bird. The house can be a pretty good blind but birds are pretty good at spotting me and I am rarely able to sneak up on them. I don’t see many Coopers here. Lots of red shoulders, red tails and kestrels but not too many Coopers.
We get mostly sharped-shinned and Coopers and they're identical except in size. The sharpies are about half the size of a Cooper's. Here's a couple from the Agua Boa trip I just got back from.
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Amazon kingfisher
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Black vultures that came close during lunch
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Cocoi heron nicely silhouetted, Amazon version of our great blue heron
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Glossy ibis flying
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Jabiru
Here's a couple more....
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Sunbittern, normally a very skittish bird but this one came into our lunch spot to feed
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He caught a minnow 9 times out of 10
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Orange-winged amazon (parrot)
I know the last two aren't birds, but you'll get over it.
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Tapir
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Capybara
Some wild life down there. That looks like a lot of fun. If that was a fishing trip you did very well on sightings and photos. I usually find it hard to get photos when there is a fishing guide or another angler in the boat. They don't want to waste valuable fishiong time while I mess around with getting a bird picture. I like fishing by myself sometimes so I can spend time on photos if the opportunity comes along. Do the birds let you get closer there or are the about as spooky as up here?
Thanks John. It's a mixed bag. Sometimes the birds set and let you get pretty close, sometimes they're spooky as any. The kingfishers notoriously let you get just close enough to tempt you into taking a shot and then fly off to the next tree down river. I've been trying to get really nice kingfisher shots since my first time down there. We were beached under a tree for shade eating lunch and that little Amazon kingfisher flew in and perched, watching the baitfish that gathered next to the boat. Finally! Same for that sun bittern, he walked along the shore, we stayed quiet and he started feeding on minnows right next to the skiff. Normally they don't let you get anywhere near. Some of the shore bords set on the sand bars while we motor by and I grab shots. When we see animals, the guides will slow or even stop the boat. Same for birds if they see me getting ready to take a photo. My fishing partners are really easy going and I don't waste a lot of time grabbing the shots. I don't spend time specifically looking for birds, other than when it isn't my turn on casting deck, then I have my binoculars out scanning.
Question for you: how do you load your photos in full size rather than thumbnails? I can't find the way to do that.
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The kingfisher and the bittern did look like you were closer. Your kingfisher shot is a nice sharp one. I like that. The bittern is a beauty also. Just sitting down can make the birds more comfortable and get you closer. Standing seems to be much more threatening to them. Kingfishers here do the same thing when I am in a kayak or boat. 100’ is their limit and then they bump to the next perch and keep playing that game. Drives me nuts but I have given up so it kind of does not bother anymore. The kingfisher was my main reason for getting a photo blind. That is great that you are able to mix some photography into the fishing day there.
That crocodile looks pretty fierce. That is cool.
You have to put your photos on a hosting site and then copy the link to the hosting site into your post. I use Imgur. It is free and that is all I use it for. It is pretty easy once you get it going but it is desktop only. They don’t let you do a mobile upload of photos. They try to direct you to making a post on their site so you start a post, upload the photos for the post then delete the post before actually making it but keep the uploaded photos. A bit of work but they look really good full size in the post or at least I think. I used to use photobucket but they started charging a fee.
Ahhh, I forgot about Imgur. I used to use it alot and still have an account. Thanks, might have to resurrect it.Quote:
Originally Posted by John H
Was over on Acklin's Island last week. We would sit and have a cold one under this casuarina pine. We noticed this "bump" on the branch right above us and I thought it was a gall, no bigger than a walnut. But another guy called me over later and said there's a hummingbird sitting in her nest. She didn't seem to care we were there or not. She came and went to fast we hardly ever saw her actually move - she was there and then she wasn't. Tiny little thing.
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I like it.
I don’t like the term bucket list but finding a hummingbird nest was kind of on it for me. Last month I was in LA and at the botanical garden there was one right in front of me on a cactus. Super cool but I was not hauling my camera around so I just had to take a mental image. It was four feet off the ground so I walked up and took a look at the eggs. The bird was coming and going pretty quickly like you described. Sit for a couple minutes then leave for a couple minutes. I would see it flying around or perched nearby. Lots of people walked by but I seemed to be the only one who cared at all about it.
It's been awhile since I just went out into the back yard to get what I could get. But this great horned owl has been perching in the downed juniper log and the stump in my neighbor's yard the last week or so. Why he likes to set so low to the ground I don't know but he seems well fed so I guess it works for him. Anyway, put on the long lens and went out.
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That owl does not seemed to be the least bit worried about you. He looks like he is half asleep and feels safe where he is. The owls I see don’t get many visitors and are pretty worried and skittish when they see me. I am guessing that second photo is a baby scrub Jay. A baby dove fell out or was pushed out of a nest in my backyard and a scrub Jay came to get it pretty quickly. There was no chance of intervening. The nest was very small and there was not room for the two chicks in it so I guess that is how it had to go. The second one seems to be doing well hanging around on the ground in the yard. I put some water out for him.
That owl is immediately aware as soon as I go out there but he doesn't fly away instinctually. I was probably 25 - 30 yards away. As you've noticed, if I walk straight toward him looking right at him he gets nervous real quick. If I walk sideways, not looking directly at him, like I'm doing something else in the yard, he's pretty calm. The two scrub jay photos are the same bird. The one I just caught him as he fluffed up and shook out his feathers in the breeze that was blowing. They nested in our blue spruce tree this spring, I could hear the baby(s) whining to be fed. The nest was so deep in there I could never see it without pushing branches aside etc and I didn't want to disturb them that much so I never got a photo. I hollowed out two juniper trunks from trees they cut down for fire prevention and made nest boxes for the chickadees - both of those boxes got used this spring too. We had 4 baby spotted ground squirrels making a nuisance of themselves, eating fresh growth on the flowers and stuff, but they've suddenly disappeared. I'm hoping the owl took care of most of them.
Edit: I don't know why that pwl photo from 2022 is in there. Can't figure out how to get rid of it. Sorry.
Kind of a different view ...
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