World Bird Wednesday LXIII

Random Raptors

   Winter is reaching that tedious portion where the cloud cover blankets the sky about 80% of the time. The Pine River is covered over with a solid sheet of ice and the ground is white with snow. We Michiganders are feeling squeezed between these two cold slices of stale bread. Bright days are a precious commodity and all of us storm outside to get a free dose of vitamin D when the sun shines. Like everyone else, I am spending way to many hours indoors bumping into walls. Today for instance I untangled the wires behind my TV entertainment complex...what a lot of spaghetti that was...this is how I'm marking time; doing silly barely useful chores. How nice it would be to play in the garden or splash in the river. Fat chance. Even the birds seem bored with cracking seeds and looking intently for critters to snatch up and fly away with. To all of you in the Southern Hemisphere or to those a thousand miles closer to the equator than where I presently sit, we long to hear the stories and see the pictures of your sunny skies and colorful birds. Help your snow bound brethren to the North break our cabin fever!

My dear, who does your nails?

The Irruption: Snow owls breed and raise young from May through September in the tundra along the Arctic rim. Apparently the small rodents known as lemmings that feed these young families had a record year in the reproduction department. Where Snow owls usually breed two owlets a season this years clutch sizes have numbered six or seven. Wintering owls of this generation have push further south and in greater numbers than any time in recent decades. I am wondering if this is true for the Snow owls of Northern Europe and Russia as well?
    I went looking and finally found one perched like a stone sculpture on top of a house near Lake St. Claire. My daughter informed me of the significance of the Snow owl to children's literature thanks to the Harry Potter series where they act as feathery postal workers delivering important messages. We agreed that my owl had a very Hogwartsian feel to it. Given the fact that this bird didn't budge for the hour I watched it is ample proof E-mail and texting has caught on with scholarly wizards and witches as well as more common place young people.
   

I'm guessing this is a Sharp-shinned hawk sitting in a Poplar tree in my woefully lit front yard.

Darn near half of this frame is filled with a weather beaten, first winter, Ring-billed gull yet it is still difficult to see. If there was a camouflage award, this would be a finalist. 

   This is the home of World Bird Wednesday. A place for bird photographers from around the world to gather and share their photographs and experiences as they pursue Natures most beautiful treasurers, the birds.

   You don't have to be a Bird Watcher or expert photographer to join in, just enjoy sharing what you bring back from your explorations and adventures into nature!

   World Bird Wednesday will be open for posting at 12 noon Tuesday EST North America through midnight on Wednesday.



#1. Simply copy the above picture onto your W.B.W. blog entry, it contains a link for your readers to share in the fun. Or, you can copy this link on to your blog page to share WBW. http://pineriverreview.blogspot.com/

#2. Come to The Pine River Review on Tuesday Noon EST North America through Wednesday midnight and submit your blog entry with InLinkz.

#3. Check back in during the course of the next day and explore these excellent photoblogs!

The idea of a meme is that you will visit each others blogs and perhaps leave a comment to encourage your compatriots!

Come on it's your turn!

World Bird Wednesday LXII

A Close Encounter

    Part of my routine when I drive anywhere is to lay my camera next to me on the front seat dialed in and ready to catch a glimpse of the roadside hawks I see plying their trade along the way. It is fortunate I have two eyes, one to watch the road and the other to scan the treeline for a well lit bird to grace these pages with. The Red-tailed hawks that sit perched like sentinels along the motorway are wary of a car pulling off to the side of the road and except for a few blessed occasions take to wing long before a good shot can be set up. These birds are wild animals and live by harsher rules then civilized man. Frustration becomes a bird photographers faithful friend.
    Having a pillow to lay on the window ledge to support the long lens in a rock solid cradle is a must. Then it's just a matter of checking the light, focusing and clicking away. Most of these are thirty second opportunities at best. If you can organise your approach to accommodate this time frame every now and then you'll strike gold. Even if the bird flies early I'll at least take one good picture of where he was, just to have had the experience of completing the cycle of events. So much the better when the bird stays posed!
     Lately, my rough camera set up would go something like this: Canon T2i shooting in jpeg format. 400mm 5.6 prime lens set at 7.1. ISO @400 even on a fairly sunny day. Shutter speed? Just as fast as I can get it, the bare minimum at 1/400 and starting to feel much better at 1/1600 since my lens is not image stabilized. This is my starting point and I adjust from there.

Today I was leaving Detroit, fleeing the fire scene, bound for the Rio Pine and anticipating the Red-tails I would naturally see. Buzzing through an east side neighborhood in my little red five speed I down shifted to nod my respects to a stop sign and there it was, sitting on it's bloody kill, a prime Coopers hawk not fifty feet away.




The Coopers hawk (Accipiter cooperii)  is perhaps the most profoundly gifted killer of other birds that Michigan's skies have to offer. Picture yourself an early 20th century poultry farmer matching wits with this hawk and it's taste for young hens.
From Familiar Birds we quote the accounts of  Mr. Forbush in 1927 who mentions the experience of a Mr. Farley:
 
This Sunday morning, May 2, 1909, soon after 9 (apparently his usual hour), the Cooper's Hawk (or another just as bad) which is getting so many chickens from poultry-raisers here on Chiltonville Hill, Plymouth (we have lost 25), appeared, coming for the coops. Mr. Graves fired at him, but the hawk, not stopped by the report, circled within a few rods and came in again. But the second barrel sent him away, apparently hit. During this entire episode there were five people standing close to the coop. A few mornings ago also, as Mr. Graves was pounding away making another coop, the hawk caught and carried off a chicken within a few yards of him. A Cooper's Hawk two years ago in East Bridgewater behaved similarly. Four times this daring bird (with people standing near) tried to get a chicken out of a hen-yard that adjoined the mixed woods where it had its nest. The people "shooed" the hawk away three times, but at the fourth attempt, despite their cries, it carried off a pullet.

    Here in 2012 my Coopers was just as non-pulsed by my presence as theirs was in 1909. The shoot lasted just a hair under two and one half minutes. Not bad considering it was a narrow and busy stretch of road. When the sun broke out I went from 1/500th second shutter speed as in the above picture to 1/1600th and we were cookin'!
    It is difficult to make the call, is this a Coopers hawk or a nearly identical Sharp shinned hawk? I wavered on my decision. The white terminal band on the rounded tail feathers, a more clearly defined black cap, and sturdier legs gave me confidence to decide in favour of the Coopers. Both share a reputation as the bane of song birds charging headlong through a tangle of branches to capture their prey. At the end of a successful chase the plucking of feathers is followed by a leisurely if gruesome meal.

   Two first time countries visited World Bird Wednesday last week: Bolivia and the Netherlands Antilles. Welcome!
   Thanks to all who leave their kind comments on my pages and those of all the contributers to WBW. It is a great honor to have your attention and company in these busy weeks.
   I received a nice E-mail from a reader in N. America asking why World Bird Wednesday starts noonish Tuesday. That's easy to explain. Tuesday noon in the Great Lakes region of N.A. is already 4:00 AM Wednesday Perth, AU. If you think about it, the people of earth (the only ones who care about stuff like this ) experience their Wednesdays over a 48 hour period!
  One of the joys of WBW is to see our planet more clearly as a whole enity with birds as our primary teachers. I love to see the wide world through your eyes and to share in turn what I am seeing. Carry on!
   Cheers, Dave

This is the home of World Bird Wednesday. A place for bird photographers from around the world to gather and share their photographs and experiences as they pursue Natures most beautiful treasurers, the birds.

You don't have to be a Bird Watcher or expert photographer to join in, just enjoy sharing what you bring back from your explorations and adventures into nature!

World Bird Wednesday will be open for posting at 12 noon Tuesday EST North America through midnight on Wednesday.

#1. Simply copy the above picture onto your W.B.W. blog entry, it contains a link for your readers to share in the fun. Or, you can copy this link on to your blog page to share WBW. http://pineriverreview.blogspot.com/

#2. Come to The Pine River Review on Tuesday Noon EST North America through Wednesday midnight and submit your blog entry with InLinkz.

#3. Check back in during the course of the next day and explore these excellent photoblogs!

The idea of a meme is that you will visit each others blogs and perhaps leave a comment to encourage your compatriots!

Come on it's your turn!

World Bird Wednesday LXI

The Name Game

   I wrote last WBW about how Mid-Michigan is inundated with eagles and as if to prove a point, scattered over this page you'll find five different Bald eagles. A flock of eagles is called a convocation, a word normally used to describe an assemblage of learned people summoned together to decree honors and privileges. The word has a ayre of religiosity and academic stuffiness to it. Grant it, Bald eagles in their various phases are grand birds and never fail to grasp your full attention with their noble presence. Still, I think our ornithological forefathers missed it on this one, instead of convocation, I might have suggested a Rumble of Eagles. Something with a bit of rough and tumble 1950's violence associated with it and rolling thunder to boot. All in all the standard terms are quite imaginative. I don't think your going to top a Murder of crows no mater what you come up with. A parliament of owls would be a tough one to beat too. When a nye of pheasants are flushed it is called a bouquet. They got it right when they named a flock of larks an exaltation. A siege of herons sounds like something a fisherman came up with. You must admit, a charm of finches is a little to cutesy-pie. A muster of storks seems perfect though I couldn't tell you why, and I wish someone could explain the expression, an unkindness of ravens! There is so much here to ponder... 

        ...and then, the question begs to be asked, what should a group of bird watchers be called? The English term Twitchers jumps to mind, a sixty year old expression describing the nervous demeanor of the high strung, obsessive, and ostentatiously learned UK birder of that era, Howard Medhurst. So would that make it, a twitch of birders?  A classic of course but could we do better? 

   Surely we, the bird photographers of today, deserve a descriptive word to better describe our own peculiar quirks when time and chance permits us to indulge in our own herd mentality.

  

This happy under aged Baldy with a tattered fish in his talons was fleeing a convocation of four older eagles!  

After giving it some serious thought my best suggestion would be a clique of bird photographers. Get it? A clique is a group of extremely cool people...check. And our camera's click more then a roomful of beatniks at a poetry reading. This is really to much fun and the opportunities to establish new lexiconic frontiers is exciting. I like it that these inventions barely make sense in conventional terms but relies more on a form of free associative logic. That is right up my alley. Would a cluster of dietitians be a glut or a crowd of firemen a splash?  The little Downy woodpecker to your right, in concert with others of it's kind, is properly called a descent. I would rename it a poke. We can be proud that birders invented this tradition of giving distinct and picturesque names to its flocks. There is plenty of room here for the rest of non-birding humanity to join in and create these snappy little catchalls though maybe we should keep this spirited word game to ourselves, you know how a good free thinking idea like this gets turned on it's head and takes on a vindictive tone by a boil of mean spirited bullies. Slurs, as we're all to aware, are the currency of jerks! Word up.   

Be at peace, it is still a flock of seagulls. In this case though, a lonely Ring-bill.

P.S.
On a bright note; two new countries visited World Bird Wednesday for the first time last week: Mongolia and Fiji. Awesome!

 

This is the home of World Bird Wednesday. A place for bird photographers from around the world to gather and share their photographs and experiences as they pursue Natures most beautiful treasurers, the birds.

You don't have to be a Bird Watcher or expert photographer to join in, just enjoy sharing what you bring back from your explorations and adventures into nature!

World Bird Wednesday will be open for posting at 12 noon Tuesday EST North America through midnight on Wednesday.

#1. Simply copy the above picture onto your W.B.W. blog entry, it contains a link for your readers to share in the fun. Or, you can copy this link on to your blog page to share WBW. http://pineriverreview.blogspot.com/

#2. Come to The Pine River Review on Tuesday Noon EST North America through Wednesday midnight and submit your blog entry with InLinkz.

#3. Check back in during the course of the next day and explore these excellent photoblogs!

The idea of a meme is that you will visit each others blogs and perhaps leave a comment to encourage your compatriots!

Come on it's your turn!

World Bird Wednesday LX

Color Me Brown

We are solidly into the new year now and rolling at full steam. My 2011 hangover is finished. I am content with the fact that the summer birds have gone south, who needs 'em anyway! Let the folks in warmer climates gaze lovingly at the pretty plumage's and take their Technicolor pictures. Now that I think about it, maybe I was a little to enamoured with the sexy egrets and herons of last summer that until recently crowded my dreams. It's a fresh year and Brown is my new favorite color. "Yes," You say, "It's easy to be pragmatic when there's no other choice." Perhaps so, but let's see what brown has to offer besides peanut butter. First on the agenda is this very alert Bald eagle that was perched down a certain dead end road, a location I frequently get good soaring eagle captures from. It's where abouts has yet to be discovered by the riff-raff and remains my own secret honey hole. Here I was able to coast up to this lovely bird and prop the camera lens on the window ledge. It was a stick infested view and all of the shots were cluttered. Even with the harsh contrasts from the bright sun working against it, this particular take fascinated me with the odd shadow play across the eye. Michigan has become absolutely besieged with eagles. I was at the point last summer where I felt apologetic about posting Blue heron pictures so often. The same could be said now for the once rare B.E. sightings. Expectations have now risen for Michigan' bird photographers to capture something extraordinary. A run of the mill Bald eagle just doesn't do it anymore.  

   Canadian geese are such cookie cutter birds. If you've seen one you've seen them all. How odd then to be confronted by this strange buff cheeked variation. It's like finding out your Mom put mustard on your peanut butter sandwich as a joke, somethings are just wrong. I like mine plain and folded over. You can tell a lot about people by how they like their peanut butter sandwich. My brother ate his with Mayo and cheese! You don't get to pick your relatives.
   I became a dedicated "Birder" just a couple of years ago and though I liked knowing what I was seeing, I was more taken with the challenge of photographing our fine feathered friends. Now that I know the difference between a Northern Cardinal and a Blue Jay, my New Years Resolution is to become familiar with the Gull family. Shame on me for not being able to instantly recognise Michigan's common varieties. I found this deviant goose at Metro Beach Park on Lake St, Clair, a new and exciting patch for me. It is gull city.

   I am going to go out on a limb and declare this bird a Second Winter Thayers Gull, but I wouldn't bet the house note on it. How did I come to this profound conclusion? I found this wonderful gull ID page. It even has cool quizzes to test your knowledge. Like learning a new language, this skill is hard won. There is no shame in getting it wrong, it's not like anyone's getting paid to know, we're just here for the cookies and milk, right?

  

   Lastly I have for you a Brown creeper. I saw this awesome little bird for the first time a couple of weeks ago and completely blew the photo op. I was crushed. My second chance came a few days ago.
    My camera, set up with the super fast shutter speed I was using earlier in the day, was sitting by the window when I spied the creeper making its way up the trunk of a Maple tree. I slid open the window and started firing away. Ten shots in, I reviewed my captures and there was blackness. Yikes! I adjusted quickly for more light and took another ten or so till the bird fluttered away. This set was blurred miserably except for a single shot where the tiny bird stood still and the 1/60th shutter speed didn't muck it up.
   That's how close my heart came to be broken again by the Brown creeper, and as we know...

"Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.”

                                                                  Charlie Brown

This is the home of World Bird Wednesday. A place for bird photographers from around the world to gather and share their photographs and experiences as they pursue Natures most beautiful treasurers, the birds.

You don't have to be a Bird Watcher or expert photographer to join in, just enjoy sharing what you bring back from your explorations and adventures into nature!

World Bird Wednesday will be open for posting at 12 noon Tuesday EST North America through midnight on Wednesday.

#1. Simply copy the above picture onto your W.B.W. blog entry, it contains a link for your readers to share in the fun. Or, you can copy this link on to your blog page to share WBW. http://pineriverreview.blogspot.com/

#2. Come to The Pine River Review on Tuesday Noon EST North America through Wednesday midnight and submit your blog entry with InLinkz.

#3. Check back in during the course of the next day and explore these excellent photoblogs!

The idea of a meme is that you will visit each others blogs and perhaps leave a comment to encourage your compatriots!

Come on it's your turn!

World Bird WednesdayLIX

Trust No One

    In the fall of last year I was on my way to Tawas Point, one of the premiere birding sites along Lake Huron about an hour from my home on the Pine River. As often happens, the best action was on the way to where I was going. I spotted an immature Red tailed hawk kiting near the road side and pulled off to practice our high tech game of bird photography. The maneuvers this young hawk was performing were a wonder; diving, soaring, and hovering. For a daydreamer like myself, it was poetry in motion. I wondered: Will human ingenuity ever be able to fashion a machine capable of imitating the sky dance of a Hawk?
    As busy as our skies are these days with human inventions, from the air in my living room (Josh bought one of those tiny remote control helicopters for Christmas) all the way to to the edge of our solar system where Voyager treks, we awkward humans remain tied to the relatively simplistic fixed wing set up used by the Wright brothers to achieve flight in 1903. Indeed, building a machine replicating the dexterity of a bird's wing remains a lofty goal for the ambitious avionics thinkers and tinkerers of today. As technological discoveries have snowballed, man now travels the heavens at thousands of miles per hour in jet driven craft. Still, raw speed aside, have we even scratched the surface of what a humble bird achieves?
Consider these factoids gleaned from my reading this week:

A Blackbird jet flying nearly 2,000 mph covers 32 of its own body lengths per second. But a common pigeon covers 75 of its body lengths a second.

The roll rate of the aerobatic A-4 Skyhawk plane is about 720 degrees per second. The roll rate of a barn swallow is more than 5,000 degrees per second.

 As beasts of the air we humans are poorly designed and it has been all our big brains can handle to invent machines to assist our rise into the wild blue yonder. We'd do better if we could let our machines work without our cumbersome fat bottomed bodies attached to them. The U.S. military flies unmanned drone aircraft over the Mid-East from a control center in the Rocky Mountains half way around the world. That expensive flight technology like this, is driven by the needs of the military to baffle and destroy it's enemies is a crying shame. It seems useless to hope for something better, like spending a few of those hard earned bucks on the decaying infrastructure of our dilapidated twentieth century cities. Excuse me for drifting away from my theme. My question: Has the miniaturisation of our artificial intelligence and mechanical systems risen to the point where, however awkwardly, we can mimic the dream like avionics of a three month old Red-tailed hawk? Could science create a life like mechanical bird? And if the day has arrived that such a miraculous robot does fly our skies, what are the practical implications of this dream realised? I put on my investigative reporter hat and got on the case!

After a quick look at this U-tube video your pride in the inventiveness of your fellow humans will be hard to contain.  Micro Air Vehicle's (MAV's) are here, brought to you by, who else, the thoughtful folks at your local Military/ Industrial think tanks. Not since Homing pigeons ferried messages across the English channel in times of war has there been such a treacherous bird in the sky. Insects, too, are being mimicked in a high tech display of ingenuity to track and destroy dastardly evil doers where they live and breathe. Think of it, a thousand lethal mechanical insects falling from a computer guided gull like drone each capable of recharging themselves endlessly off our domestic power lines and making the world safe for... yeah, safe for who and what? Click on this text for an additional science based horror show!

 

   The remnants of purity, and innocents of vision seems to be vanishing. Things are not what they are anymore. A is not A, just opposite of what Aristotle's Law of Idenity supposed.
   The day has arrived when some of us on this planet can not trust the fanciful sight of a bird in flight to be a benign comfort. Apparently warrior birds are at this moment being field tested in combat. Click on this text for the brutal proof.  As domestic law enforcement finds uses for these lethal "toys" will any of us ever look at the silhouette of our beloved birds with the same trust and benevolence as we do today?
   The truth is out there!

This is the home of World Bird Wednesday. A place for bird photographers from around the world to gather and share their photographs and experiences as they pursue Natures most beautiful treasurers, the birds.

You don't have to be a Bird Watcher or expert photographer to join in, just enjoy sharing what you bring back from your explorations and adventures into nature!

World Bird Wednesday will be open for posting at 12 noon Tuesday EST North America through midnight on Wednesday.

#1. Simply copy the above picture onto your W.B.W. blog entry, it contains a link for your readers to share in the fun. Or, you can copy this link on to your blog page to share WBW. http://pineriverreview.blogspot.com/

#2. Come to The Pine River Review on Tuesday Noon EST North America through Wednesday midnight and submit your blog entry with InLinkz.

#3. Check back in during the course of the next day and explore these excellent photoblogs!

The idea of a meme is that you will visit each others blogs and perhaps leave a comment to encourage your compatriots!

Come on it's your turn!