The Pine River Review

World Bird Wednesday LXVI

2012-02-21T10:30:00.004-05:00

Hunt and Peck

Red bellied woodpecker

   As winter wains this late February I have become struck with the idea of retirement. Firefighters in Detroit are forced out of the fire service at 60 anyway and I am only a meager year away from that. My cities financial troubles are such that after 312 years the state of Michigan is contemplating a bloodless coup d'etat. New laws have been implemented making it possible for our Governor to discharge the elected representatives of our city, the Mayor and City Council, and put into place an Emergency Financial Manager (read: dictator). All contracts with municipal workers would be suspended and the EFM could put into place any measures he deems necessary to reorganise the apocryphal situation that is Detroit. This scenario has already played out in other cities. Pontiac, Michigan's whole police department was disbanded recently never to return.
   The handwriting is on the wall. The once powerful Motor City is intentionally being depopulated and burned to the ground. What is the point of fighting it anymore?
   Is this the logical extension of a consumer society: Like a giant game of Monopoly gone bad, we simply flip the game board over and begin again?

   Soon I will be out with the rest of the turkeys hunting and pecking but it won't be for insects and seeds. I will be searching for relevance. After years of firefighting it was rather easy to define the essential function I served on this planet other than our common Darwinian mission to multiply: I helped to put out a lot of fires. In fire science we learn that fire is a rapid form of oxidation, it's like rust gone mad. The Great Lakes are part of a region affectionately known as the rust belt because of our history of building flashy if some what easily corroded vehicles. No problem, we'd crush up the hulks, melt them down, and sell it back to you every two years.
   I must undertake a similar transformation. An unenviable problem to have, making something new out of this old chassis!

   It is a great privilege to have served with and stood next to so many brave souls in good times and in bad. Now I will be on the outside looking in. Isn't that like bird photography, standing on the edge of the flock peering in, a curious outsider?
   Life is not lived in a vacuum, new activities will fill in the time that was devoted to a career. However; it is foolhardy to expect anything short of a knife fight could replace the adrenalin rush of responding to the alarm.
   Bird photography has sat at the other end of the emotional teeter totter across from big city firefighting bringing me into a kind of balance. I wonder how it will be chasing the flock full time? Stay tuned!

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.

#1Simply 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/

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

#3Check 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 LXV

2012-02-14T10:24:00.001-05:00

The Perfect Stranger

It was a little piece of bird photographer heaven right in my own front yard. I had a resident flock of Cedar waxwings visiting my cherry tree for a good three days. Anyone whose tried to get pictures of these sleek little birds knows what a tough catch they are. Not because they're shy creatures, they're decidedly not, it's the fine hair like quality of their smooth pastel plumage that seems all but impossible to capture.
Mine was a visitation of twenty or so of the flashy little bandits that hung out in ambush positions at the top of the tall Poplars and Tameracks and swooped in at intervals to feast on what was left of the freeze dried fruit that still cling to the cherry tree. They didn't seem to mind me darting out from under a Blue spruce searching for the optimum angle like a caffeined up fashion photographer.

Wandering Gypsies that they are, the arrival and departure of an ear-full or a museum of Waxwings cannot be known. Unless your protecting a Northern cherry orchard they are pleasant company. I cannot think of another bird bird in these cold Great Lakes regions that has such a refined tropical look and courtly manners. It could be the North Woods version of Cupid or Eros so lovingly and politely do these birds treat each other and the world at large. I would recommend Bombycilla cedrorum as the perfect representative for Valentines day, so easily can they steal your heart!
From Familiar Birds we read this account from: Bradford Torrey (1885) who gives us this delightfully dainty snapshot of the cedarbird: "Taking an evening walk, I was stopped by the sight of a pair of cedar-birds on a stone wall. They had chosen a convenient flat stone, and were hopping about upon it, pausing every moment or two to put their little bills together. What a loving ecstasy possessed them! Sometimes one, sometimes the other, sounded a faint lisping note, and motioned for another kiss. But there is no setting forth the ineffable grace and sweetness of their chaste behavior."

Again from Familiar Birds: Alexander Wilson (Wilson and Bonaparte, 1832), writing of this attractive decoration says: "Six or seven, and sometimes the whole nine, secondary feathers of the wings are ornamented at the tips with small red oblong appendages, resembling red sealing-wax; these appear to be a prolongation of the shafts, and to be intended for preserving the ends, and consequently the vanes, of the quills, from being broken and worn away by the almost continual fluttering of the bird among thick branches of the cedar. The feathers of those birds which are without these appendages are uniformly found ragged on the edges, but smooth and perfect in those on whom the marks are full and numerous."

Please note: This is the only time I have ever seen waxy appendages on the tail feathers!

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.

#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 LXIV

2012-02-07T10:26:00.003-05:00

The Luck of the Draw

There is a huge end of season sale on hawk pictures. Better get 'em while you can, these prices will not be available again the rest of the year. The Red-tailed hawk is in clear view these late winter days before the storm tossed heads of the hardwoods thicken again with new green foliage. While it is one thing to photograph a perched RTHawk serenely scanning the roadside fields for the squirrels, mice, and chipmunks, it is quite another to snatch these ruddy raptors on the wing. I have often been amazed how quirky jerky shore birds transform into superbly aerodynamic creatures when they take to the air. It is much the same with these chunky raptors with their Churchillian panache. Once in the air the lines sharpen from a rotund heaftyness to that of a knife edged battleaxe. It is a breathtaking transformation the nuance of which is much to fast for the naked eye to fathom. Digital photography steps into that gap with a tecnological feat known as Auto-focus. Most cameras focus when the shutter button is half pressed forcing the camera to refocus with every shot. On my Dslr camera focusing duties are given over to a seperate button maintaning constant focus on moving objects while I worry about keeping a soaring bird centered in the frame and timing a well lit shot. Alas, even autofocus is easily and often confused when a brown bird flies through a branch filled world and our good friend Luck determines whether there is a prize in the camera or not.

    "Diligence is the mother of good luck." So said Benjamin Franklin and though he wasn't speaking of nature photography his sentiments ring true here too. Diligence is definetly what it takes to bring home the bacon. Problem is, having your eye pasted to a view finder changes the essential experience that brought you to nature in the first place.
   There seems to be a schism between pure observation and photographing an event. I feel it myself. So much concentration goes into getting a snap that not much of me is left over for the pure emotion of being at the crossroads of time and place. Isn't that why folk are enamoured with the adventuresome nature of wild life photography, that the person taking the picture is as present in the blessed moment as the beast itself? This is perhaps a misconception. I see these encounters as opportunities to get lucky. Bottom line: If I see a beautifully lit bird and I don't have my camera, I curse my luck. Shame on me!
   The emotional element comes later when I open my files and see if a good picture was managed. A cracking shot gives the moment its special significance. No picture/No fun. This seems rather superficial doesn't it? Does Franklin's "Diligence" have its down side?
   I don't think I was always this way. I used to be able to breathe in nature as a particapent but being behind the camera has changed all that. Nature for me is now experienced in the third person.
   Is this the price one pays for Good Luck?

The country of Qatar joined World Bird Wednesday for the first time last week. Welcome!

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.

#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 LXIII

2012-01-31T10:30:00.002-05:00

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.

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.

#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

2012-01-24T10:28:00.001-05:00

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

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.

#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

2012-01-17T10:30:00.005-05:00

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!

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.

#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

2012-01-10T10:30:00.052-05:00

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

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.

#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

2012-01-03T10:30:00.005-05:00

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!

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.

#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 LVIII

2011-12-27T10:30:00.004-05:00

Refrigerator Soup

Let me tell you about a Firehouse custom. These cold mornings at Engine 23, it is my first responsibility to make soup from the left overs of the previous days lunch and dinner before we go out to check for frozen hydrants. It is a long standing tradition, born in the misty past, that the driver of the Engine (me) makes the soup and God knows the firehouse is nothing without tradition. Every morning during hydrant season; the days between October 1st and April 30th we check each fire hydrant in the city for leakage once a month. That involves driving around in the big rig, jumping off and hand dipping each one with a weight strung to the end of a rope. If the string, as it's pulled out, brings with it a splash of water, that hydrant is in danger of freezing solid and must be blown out dry with compressed air down below the frost line. A frozen hydrant wastes precious time in the effort to put the wet stuff on the red stuff.

Making soup and checking hydrants are twin rituals, like the steady tick and tock of a grandfather clock. The dependable morning rite starts the steady rhythm of the day, it makes the Firehouse: Home. There is no recipe for refrigerator soup, in the 112 years it has been improvised in Engine 23's big kitchen, never has it been made twice the same. It may start with corned beef, sausage, chicken, fish, veal, ham, pork roast, or it may have no meat base at all. I've seen times when there were no left overs at all, then we'd have a go with a creamy potato and onion probably.

What so ever survives the night gets chopped up in the morning and put into the soup. Tradition!

For awhile we tried to name the soup du jour. Names like "The Chiefs Out of the Loop Soup" came in moments of inspiration. However; the magic is not in the naming but in the preparation. For me a work day begins with chopped onions and the din of a hundred peculating conversation when sixteen A-type firehouse personalities, all hopped up on black coffee, are pressed around the chopping block as our shifts change. It is not a polite group and many a delicate soul has been diced up and thrown into the boil. There is often a bruised ego in the broth!

World Bird Wednesday reminds me of refrigerator soup, warm, filling, and invigorating no mater the ingredients. While the fixing's are always different and the proportions at times preposterous, it is the shared experience of making soup that adds subtlety of flavour and aroma, like three bay leaves.

The firehouse and WBW are as much a cooking school as anything else. You get to taste it all and watch it being made. Secrets are revealed. The traditions of every cuisine meet and melt, they become a part of your personal experience.

Here in the Detroit Fire Department, the Black guys can cook Chinese, the Hillbillies prepare a mean Mid-eastern, the Asians throw down on soul food, and the Latins can kick out a Polish Wedding in a heart beat. There's no point getting your britches twisted. Superficial expectations diminish and the lines we mistook for boarders become pleasantly blurred because, in the end, we'll all wind up together in tomorrow's soup anyway!

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.

#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 LVII

2011-12-20T10:35:00.034-05:00

A Mark in Time

What marks the passing of 2011 for you? Perhaps there is a new baby in your family or maybe you've discovered your passion and are ready to begin your life's work in earnest. A year is a convenient measure of time, beginning and ending for us Michiganders in the shivering cold of winter. A single day is a life time in microcosm; it's bookends a long sleep. It is useful to think in such terms, to take an accounting of our experiences and then stack them in orderly rows. I sought to understand the ebb and flow of my life by making a timeline and writing down under each year the noteworthy things that had occurred. At first it was easy. Kindergarten in '58, High School in '71, Heart attack in '07...but then, there were many lost years, like 1996, that stared back vacantly. Once a carpenter friend sought to explain the passage of years to me by stretching out a metal tape measure to 75 inches. "This," He remarked,"represents the average life expectancy of a human being." He went on to ask my age and grasped the ruler at that mark and inch number 75, pinching off a messily 17 inches in the process and letting the rest dangle in a mess on the floor.

"And this is all you've got left."

I am not so tough that I didn't get a cold shiver at this graphic display.

As a bird photographer the passing of a year is measured in photographic moments, those peak experiences when you, nature and your f-stop come together in kumbaya harmony. For this WBW and perhaps the next I'll be poking through the ashes of year 2011's findings to stir the fire and enjoy the warmth again.

The arrival of my 400mm Canon 5.6 L lens in the early going of 2011 clearly put its mark on this, my 58th trip around the sun. I took around 30,000 bird shots this year, the vast majority had the 400mm on board. The first Eagle pictures taken with this rig took me completely by surprise, there was more raw power here than I could have ever hoped for. Like a novice magician tapping his wand and garbling the incantations, it was difficult to predict how and when the magic would explode. Who knew taking pictures could capture shaman like views of a hidden world? I was hooked, and with the fervour of the newly converted I went out daily to polish my approach.

Suzanne and I took a week in Florida where her hard won vacation was turned into a field trip. She was slowly coming to terms with her boyfriend losing his mind to bird photography. My driving had become particularly erratic as I automatically scanned the tree lines for raptors, these near death experiences concerned her, a cracking hawk picture was not something she was willing to give her life for, but for the most part, the people close to me have been amused by, and tolerated my fixation.

Like they had a choice!

Has this year made an indelible mark on your life? Were your calm waters stirred? Has your sense of wonder been awakened? Have you lost sleep over the excitement of a new discovery? These are the small things I pray for and wish for you this Holiday Season.

   It is no wonder we mark the winter solstice with a beautiful variety of celebrations across this planet. At the heart of it, all the world's creatures share a common desire for an abundant life. We are all not so lucky.
   Maybe we should all make that call today, surprise an old friend who spends long hours alone, or put a strong arm around someone elses troubles.
   Remember please, this simple advise: You are the blessing, share it.
  That is a mark worth making!

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.

#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 LVI

2011-12-13T10:31:00.007-05:00

Close at hand!

I have been sticking close to home this week while our skies have been heavy with thick cloud banks and not much help for bird photography. When a little bit of good light did brake through, it didn't last long, so I keep my camera close at hand and ready to react. There was no shortage of feathery subjects willing to model for the mixed nuts and seeds that stuff the feeders hung in the Maple tree just outside. A picture window is perfectly placed to observe the action. Sliding open the little side windows that frame the big glass makes it possible to take good unobstructed shots while leaning over the back of the living room couch, coffee and computer still close at hand. This is easy living! The light is excellent from this pampered perch all morning when the sun does shines. A little further out on the lawn a cherry tree has been hopping with Cedar-waxwings. When I see them massing high in the poplar or tamarack trees I whip on my coat, sneak outside and hide close by as they swoop down to harvest the cherries. They, along with the chickadees, titmice, cardinals, woodpeckers and jays are my cheerful companions, a reliable antidote to the low light winter blues.

This has been the extent of my birding adventures this week: My own front yard and couch!

"If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye."

Honore de Balzac

It's much easier to take pictures in full light and often we will try to push the limits of the available illumination and try to artificially produce a picture that appears well lit even when it wasn't in the first place. Our post processing tools give us a good push in that direction, to make of a thing something it never was. But what of the scene as the eye saw it? Dimly lit and atmospheric. Doesn't that tell it's own story? Of course it does, but the limitations of our cameras to capture such moody, under lit scenes as our eye sees them is difficult to achieve. Our Birds don't always inhabit a brightly lit branch but you would think so given the vast majority of saved images. It really is only a very small part of the story. Birds make their living in the rain and snow and endure the long dark night. There is living detail in the shadows. I am thinking of Rembrandt's Night Watch or Van Gogh's Starry Night. Could we paint such scenes with a camera?

You get the Idea. When my stretch of days ended at the home front, it was time to turn towards Detroit and fight fires. Wouldn't you know it....the sun blazed for the trip down. After days of thinking about Dutch painters and such matters dreary skies bring to mind, I visited Dow's ponds on the drive out and Bam! Just like that I captured today's header photo of the Common merganser walking on water and a nicely lit eagle maneuver.
All said and done, it was nice to be back in the sunshine!

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.

#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 LV

2011-12-06T10:30:00.020-05:00

The Zen of Flight Photography

We started the week with a good dose of snow and so it seems winter's long night has begun in earnest. Cold weather out of the North-West can often mean clear skies with the bright luminescence of a low arching December sun beaming through the trees. This is prime time to try and pull off some small bird-in-flight captures. When ever I see a good song bird flight picture I'll stop and take notice. They are a rare commodity. Getting one by accident is a pipe dream, achieving it with purpose is time consuming and baffling. Many methods have been tried to achieve good results and often successfully so. Consider please photographer/genius Étienne-Jules Marey of 19th century France who managed to apply multiple time lapse images of a flying pelican onto a single negative. The quality of this image taken in 1882 still holds up brilliantly some 130 years later. To this purpose Monsieur Marey invented a photographic machine gun that could shoot twelve frames a second. My sophisticated Dslr camera of today shoots only seven.

                 Marey's images pushed the study of anatomical motion light years ahead. His books: La Machine animales/Animal Mechinism and Le Vol des Oiseaux/ The Flight of Birds, was followed by Le Mouvement in 1894, famously illuminating in great detail many mysteries including how a cat always lands on it's feet and that indeed, all four horse's hooves do leave the ground simultaneously at a full gallop.
    Photography and Enlightenment had begun a intriguing relationship.

If the trick of capturing a Bird in Flight was pulled off so effectively in 1882, then why is this accomplishment still so intoxicating to every bird photographer great and small to this very day? Perhaps it has more to do with the singular experience of taking such a picture than the picture itself.

Only up to a point, and a very fine point it is, can nature photography be planned in advance. (By the way, is that a tether knotted to Marey's pelican's foot?) When the day begins it is impossible to predict what birds we shall see and know the time of their arrival. We are seekers, open to opportunity. Ours is a reactive pastime, and an impressive level of concentration is required to simply observe, let alone pull off the mechanics involved in photographing our prey. A great shot is always just around the next corner and our reflexes are set to snap it.

No one, and no technology is fast enough to track a song bird in flight at close quarters. Coupling that limitation with the need for shutter speeds in the vicinity of 1/2000 of a second and a cracker thin depth of focus it's easy to see why folks rehearse their in-flight photog' skills on lazily gliding gulls.

The advanced practice takes total immersion; a Zen like focus on the Here and Now. That and $2000 worth of camera gear!

A White-breasted nuthatch in flight. A moment in time.

My technique involves picking a cubic foot of air near a feeder and shooting picture after picture as the yard birds streak through it. 99.9% of these attempts contain nothing but clear air and are nudged into the waste basket. Out of focus and blurred birds round out the last 1/10 of one percent. As a meditation exercise the student of Zen presses a stick in the sand and in a flash of inspired motion attempts to scratch a single perfect circle, an endless endeavour to momentarily experience perfection. How can anything so inherently frustrating lead to Nirvana? You'll have to ask the Buddha that one. To achieve a bird in flight capture we apply the same demented principle to a camera. The truth is the effort to take these pictures puts you 100% in The Present, the razor thin chasm between the past and future. I don't think the animal kingdom in general devotes much time to such aesthetic pursuits as reaching harmony with the Universe. They don't need to. It is Humankind's special delusion to see itself as separate and insulated from Mother Earth like the thermos bottle in your lunch box.

A Black-capped chickadee in full bloom.

Perhaps that lucky strike photo is all the proof we really need that if only for a moment, we too can delve into the kind of transcendent oneness a cat experiences when it lands softly on it's feet after a great fall or view the mystical mastery a bird has over it's wing tips as it manages the million micro maneuvers that sees it safely to it's perch.

Bottom line: Small bird in flight photography is fun and does require your full awareness. The rare good pictures are Bliss, a souvenir from from a momentary glimpse of heaven!

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.

#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 LIV

2011-11-29T10:30:00.026-05:00

Well Grounded

I was grounded this week. Between cooking, cleaning, and making conversation with the good folks up visiting my Rio Pine sanctuary for the weekend, the chance to break away for several self-indulgent hours and take bird pictures wasn't in the cards. Being a good host took priority. To get even a few fresh shots to share this week, yard birds would be on the menu and I'd have to sneak them as deftly as a thirteen-year-old stealing beers at a Baptist wedding. Fortunately there is a ornamental tree in the front yard that holds it's red, cherry sized fruit long after it's leaves have dropped and makes for a colorful prop. With a feeder hung close by, you can count on the neighborhood birds to perch and pose in this pseudo natural setting. I lurk there, a cozy assassin in a chair blind built for rifle hunters that renders me invisible. It's a bait pile, a photographic trap with good production values. The planning involves taking a few test shots, about two or three hundred. Some of the early results are promising and I can't wait to delve further into the illusion. Even a plain old House finch looks pretty good given the star treatment.

While my guests attention was other wise diverted, I took the few stolen moments to slip into the yard and play with shooting angles, trimming branches here and there that tended to block the good sight lines. When I sensed my presence was being missed, I would slip through the backdoor to reappear again like a good magician at exactly the right second armed with a pithy comment.

Bird lovers are an odd lot and our way of seeing the world, while quite understandable to us, might be difficult to explain in a reasonable way to a normally configured brain. For instance, while showing a few of these pictures to a guest I tried to explain the interesting nature of avian foot structure and the difference good toe detail could make to a bird photograph. Who wouldn't want to see the microscopic crags and crevasses of a tiny birds feet, their grip and presence like that of a gnarled tree root that holds fast to the earth and keeps a towering tree upright, the very essence of fortitude and perseverance? I do not think, as my friend insinuated, that I have AFF, Avian Foot Fetish issues that should be monitored by a licenced professional. However; like World peace, I can't understand why everyone isn't interested in such enthralling issues.
   It is a solitary life I lead in the softly lit room between my ears. It's central issues and themes are often at odds with the general pandemonium that swirls around me. I want to belong to and participate in the comings and goings of the dear people whose waves reach my shore. That tether of shared experience is important to me yet a sense of detachment remains.
There is a danger in practicing and emphasizing your singularity of vision. True: The creative beast must be fed or it perishes quickly, but the time it takes to cultivate and construct the nuances of a richly imagined point of view often amounts to many lost hours and even days from those you love. They wonder what the hell your thinking about all the time, what it is that feeds your soul. There is no guarantee anything tangible will ever come and give credence to what is certainly the gigantic self indulgence of pursuing your vision quest.
   Like the balance between shutter speed, depth of field, and sensitivity to light that goes into making a fine photograph, finding an equilibrium between inner focus and family life, is a never ending struggle.

This my friend, is some good toe!

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.

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

#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 compadres!

Come on it's your turn!

World Bird Wednesday LIII

2011-11-22T10:29:00.007-05:00

A World of Sticks

I think I still have a bit of a hangover from WBW's 1st anniversary blast last week. My mind is blank, over played in the face of the remarkable nature of your kind comments and well wishes. My pictures seem random and disconnected as I look for candidates to splash a blog post with. It's hard to see a thread of logic or a story to connect them with. I wish I had a good turkey picture to make ironic Thanksgiving comments about, maybe relate it to the naive Native Americans who paid a hefty price for the sin of poor character assessment when the billowing sails of ocean going vessels first tipped over the Eastern Horizon. That point has been made, sharpened many times over.
Yes, if it is your fate to be American, it is a good bet a fifteen to twenty pound turkey torso is laying in wait inside your refrigerator. There is one in mine, complete with a pop up thermal plug to let me know when the bird is thoroughly roasted. If your not American or decline to celebrate overindulgence this Thanksgiving holiday, rejoice and be thankful anyway, as a WBW person you will be fondly and well remembered as I lift a toast while counting my greatest blessings this Thursday. If by chance, luck has you in Michigan this week, there is a chair for you at my table and a soft pillow to cradle your head after chow.

Luckily this is a bird blog, and it's never a mistake to simply tell how you got the pictures.

My son Josh and I took a cruise around Belle Isle one morning after work. His Firehouse and mine had gone to a little church fire the evening before but other than that the night had passed peacefully. Belle Isle is our decompression zone. We meet there to share and shed the comings and goings of the previous work day. The patch lays across the MacArthur bridge; a calm, green oasis, a stones throw from the poor neighborhoods of lower East-side Detroit that we fight fires in. Half way between Lakes Huron and Erie, along the Great Lake's flyway, it's a prime stopover point for migrating birds. A family of Night Herons summers here and they're a lot easier to find now that the leaves have fallen. Their hiding places made bare, we can see right into the world of sticks.
The big news this week has been the Tundra swans out on the choppy waters of the Detroit river. The adult swans are leading the Atlantic flock from their summer home along the Arctic rim, funneling down the center of the continent to the wintering grounds up and down the North American Eastern seaboard. It is a nice diversion to think that these great birds were in such an exotic location just a short time ago; World travelers come to town with the salt of strange seas still on their feathers.

The comings and goings of bird life is stock and trade for us, the watchers of nature. We mark time by the migrations as surely as the Astronomers can, guided by the path of stars through the heavens. To what end does this watching take us?

It is folly maybe, to think you can look into the mind of another species. To know their motivations, the primal urge to raise wings and commence a great journey. To see in your minds eye the stars in the same way they do. To feel the magnetic pull of the Earths poles and travel the third dimension of air, wind, and thermals as surely and deftly as we Earth bound souls scratch the dirt with our hands and feet. Are we designed for lesser things than they that flock above?

Do they pity us, 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.

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

#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 compadres!

Come on it's your turn!

World Bird Wednesday LII

2011-11-15T10:30:00.007-05:00

Happy Anniversary

   Recognise this guy? Yep. It is the little White-throated Sparrow that has become the iconic face of World Bird Wednesday. It was October 30th, 2010. Joe "the bird whistler" Paquette and I had left the Motor City that morning for a weekend of guitar playing and photography with my brand spanking new Canon T2i Dslr Camera. Joe's talent, among others, is his ability to call in birds with weird whistles and clattering noises. The strange and unusual forest creatures I seldom see show up unaccountably when he is around. There is that aura about him.
   I was still lugging in my fire gear from the car when Joe called for me to hurry up and come to the back yard. I was kind of tired and did not wished to be hustled after a night of firefighting and the two hour drive back home. "Wait!"
   When I gathered myself and got out there to see what was troubling him, he pointed to this feathery confection, an ounce of wild life that would change the course of my Wednesdays forever.

I bolted for the camera, a million thoughts tumbling through my mind. The Dslr was still foreign to me as I had barely a thousand blurry shots under my belt. I didn't trust the damn thing to take a good picture with me operating it. What lens should I use? What setting? Was the battery charged? Would the sparrow still be there?
The bird had not moved much and was busy gobbling down a hornet. It began to occur to us that something was wrong. No bird, even a juvenile, would tolerate the close, ponderous presence of a couple of large men. Our bird could not fly.

I trusted the camera and began to take pictures in the Program mode, the inboard electronics making the important decisions concerning shutter speed, and f-stop. A wise choice in those days. The object of our attention began to hop around, agitated at it's predicament, and fell into a four foot deep, wood framed ditch that was dug out to accommodate the large egress windows my basement is fitted with. We couldn't let him stay trapped there so Joe went into rescue mode and fished him out. It was time to leave the bird alone, all this photography was not helping his prospects. The next morning Joe happened upon our little sparrow laying underneath a blue spruce, it's spirit having passed from this world and so it's body rests, buried there 'till this day.

   Matthew10:29 goes something like this:"Not even a sparrow, worth only half a penny, can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it."
   This verse has stuck to me with some essential truth that I could not quite grasp. It struck me one day that in order for this to be true, everything; rocks, clouds, air, and even the very soil we tread upon, must be conscious and enlivened in some way. Thus, when the insignificant sparrow falls, the Earth receives it knowingly. I felt the tingle that accompanies true epiphanies.
   Frank Zappa asked the musical question to the lilting Philosopher,"Who you jiving with that cosmic debris?"
   It is a good thing philosophy and religion can not be fact checked, it would ruin their usefulness!

Just a couple weeks after this encounter I took the plunge and started World Bird Wednesday as an extension of my four month old blog, The Pine River Review. How could a year have passed already?
Back in those lonely days I took inspiration from and patterned my own unremarkable efforts after three exceptional blogs.

Me, Boomer, and the Vermilon River was a model of steadfastness. Gary never wavers in his efforts to chronicle the natural world in his niche of Northern Ontario and shows that if you make the effort to get out, nature will reveal herself endlessly.

Hilke's One Jackdaw Birding set a level for insight and native knowledge of bird life that is welcoming and enthusiastic. To me, her seal of approval meant my efforts were gaining credibility.

Lastly, Owen's Magic Lantern Show illuminated a path of possibilities for me, that a combination of brilliant photography along with personal, eclectic, and amusing writing like his, could raise the level of simple journal blogging into a powerful art form. Heady stuff!

World Bird Wednesday, such as it is, owes much to these influences. Today, a year later, this list has grown immensely as I have learned, laughed and been jaw dropped by a hundred different approaches to this pastime we share. It is wonderful to behold the light of so many kindred spirits!

To this date WBW has been shared in 122 countries, that amazes me. It is a tribute to the fine bloggers who participate with their blissful posts for our enjoyment and especially to those who leave their comments of encouragement to further those efforts. The currency of praise can not be inflated to highly!

Light a candle, lift a toast, because...

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.

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

#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 compadres!

Come on it's your turn!

World Bird Wednesday LI

2011-11-08T10:31:00.008-05:00

Haven't We Met Somewhere Before?

   Some of my favorite and most productive birding locals have been put off limits to me due to duck and deer hunting. Everyone needs to have a little fun I suppose, including the hunters who help pave the way financially and politically to make sure there are such things as nature preserves and that wetlands are maintained and advocated for.
   In my country the opening line of our Declaration of Independence "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union" is quickly morphing into "Your on your own buddy, don't come looking to me for sympathy." If your not quick enough or strong enough to get by on your own moxie, to bad for you, the game, as it is played in the U.S.A., is for the powerful and this is still a damn good country especially if your playing with the House's money.
   It is no easy feat to organise and find funding for something as nebulous as habitat for non-contributing avian and amphibian life. Our gun loving citizens and their lobby are big time players in American politics, and the powers that be know better than to ruffle their feathers or infringe on their playgrounds. So we, the eccentric birders and bird photographers, ride the political coat tails of those whose interest in birds centers on shooting them out of the sky. Politics makes for strange bedfellows. In the world of power politics we, the nature photographers, are the Great Unwashed or as a birder might put it, LBJ's (little brown job's:-)!
  If we don't flock we're finished.

The commonest bird on the planet is the Red Jungle Fowl (Gallus gallus) also known as the chicken. We love our chicken and don't want to go through the trouble of shooting them in the wild so they are raised by the billions in controlled environments for our consumption. Indeed it is feared the Red Jungle fowl may be extinct in the wild. We generally see them plucked, carved, and packed in plastic covered Styrofoam trays. Hardly a sighting you'd want to inform E-bird about. If we were to divide chickens up equally and fairly among the Earth's people you would be receiving eight in the mail as your inheritance. "Yes," You might add, "But what of the wild birds, which is most common?" The answer to that question appears to be the Red-billed Quelea (Quelea quelea) of sub-Sahara Africa. I had never heard of it before today! Not surprising I suppose, since it's range is limited even though it numbers are estimated to be over 1.5 billion mating birds. Well, how can the Quelea be considered the most "common" bird if it is not seen by the most people? Good question. The Quelea may indeed be the most populous wild bird but the bird seen by the most people day in day out is... The House Sparrow (passer domesticus): The ultimate LBJ.

As I went forth this week to record the birds of Michigan I got a taste of my status as a bird photographer. I asked the Ranger why the refuge would be closed until May. "We have to give the birds a rest." He said. This I could understand even if it reduces my opportunity to see and photograph something remarkable. Just then I remembered the temporary Shooting blinds that had been trucked into the refuge at the end of October and set up at strategic positions. Some rest. I'll bet I could take one hell of a picture of a Canadian goose falling out of the sky. I wonder if the herons, eagles, and cranes tolerate the explosions of bird shot knowing their habitat opportunities would be even more greatly reduced if the hunters where not so gung-ho about stuffing their freezers with greasy duck and goose meat.

Having received the word from the man I went back to my car to drive home. I paused, key in hand, to the sound of excited bird calls. I need pictures, lots of them to fill the bird freezer that is my hard drive. There behind the Shiawassee Refuge's Welcome Center was a brush pile popping with House sparrows. I sat in the mud trying to remain inconspicuous and nonthreatening as I clicked away. My spirit lifted.
The Egyptians used the picture of a sparrow to express the idea: common, dirty, and vile. They also credited the sparrow with carrying our souls to heaven. I felt like I was with my people.

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

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

#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 compadres!

Come on it's your turn!

World Bird Wednesday L

2011-11-01T10:30:00.012-04:00

Devil's Night

In keeping with the season, even if I'm a day late and a dollar short, I'd like to share some Halloween spirit. I have been watching horror movies one after another for the last couple of weeks, alone up here in the North woods. That, along with my firehouse days in Detroit, have spawned plenty of horror filled moments to macabre to relate.

Our shared mortality is the great unspoken. We can except death and dying as a function of nature, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but when we feel the cold breath of the Reaper no one is immune from the nerve jangling fear of the ultimate darkness. We take it personal.

Devils Night comes each year to Detroit, the night before Halloween. It is a freakishly violent tradition where shadowy arsonist declare total warfare on the dilapidated neighborhoods of my Rustbelt hometown. It is pure evil. Every "fire buff "(the hanger ons, paparazzi and groupies) that can manage the travel expense are here in mass, waiting for the the torch to be lit, to drink of our blood. Our admirers want to feel the hurt and dance on our early graves. Like mindless zombies they crowd around the firehouses waiting for the doors to open and the trucks to barrel out. The curious pray for havoc and when the real devils acquiesce to their wishes the chaotic celebration begins.
The fire storm is something to see, that I will admit. The smoke column lifting from a 90 year old wood frame structure is a mixture of twirling embers and superheated smoke riding the wind upward like the jet-stream behind a cackling, broom wielding witch.

Some folk claim to be able to see things in the flames as they envelope these old homes and businesses. I see it sometimes myself. Spirits, or ghosts maybe, separated and cast off from their haunts like an inept dentist might rip out a sore tooth. I can plainly see a face in this fire picture from a few nights ago. A dispirited entity? The more I stare the clearer the face of a witch becomes, I can even make out the hat now! This picture is straight out of the camera and probably nothing more than an example of the human brain seeking to apply meaning to the random patterns of an elemental and frankly frightening force of nature. There is a desire to make sense of it, to control it, to make light of its terrifying potential and dark cruelty. But when the hair stands up on the back of your neck, it's hard not to believe your gut when it's telling you some malevolent force is at work.

There is a field at Shiawassee Reserve that is given over to sunflowers. Acres and acres of them. As it has gone to seed massive flocks of Red-winged blackbirds have collected there. The swirling noise of the winged hoards is oppressive. Naturally visions of Hitchcock's "Birds" come to mind, so effective was his slow boiling paranoia it resonates all these years later. It is unsettling to be there alone and so vulnerable, I can't take it very long.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to take a little break from all this ghoulishness and watch The Marx Brother's Duck Soup tonight!

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World Bird Wednesday IL

2011-10-25T10:30:00.029-04:00

Out of Nowhere

The Green Wall

   It didn't take long for the hardwoods that line the Pine river to shed their leaves and reveal the tangled jumble of naked branches that hide beneath. Gusty winds blew rain storms through the Great Lakes region this week and even the mighty oaks, who usually hold tight to their dead leaves all winter long, had their heads tossed and littered the lawn with a chaos of brown confetti.
   The opposite bank from my riverside home is affectionately known as the Green Wall, an iron curtain of impenetrable vegetation that is quickly losing it's density. Beyond that flood plain is Pine River road and a few other homes that stay hidden all summer long behind the illusion of complete deep woods isolation. Soon I will see lights twinkling out there, a sure sign there are others who share this boreal forest sancturary.
    My mind was immersed in raking up the leafy fallout and readying it for the mulch pile when I spotted an adult Bald eagle sitting on a rock in the middle of the river a ways down stream. Sprinting into the house I grabbed my camera on the outside chance the bird would hold it's position long enough to pose for a picture. I planned to capture a quick reference shot but as I approached the bank looking for the distant angle the eagle lifted off. Was she teasing me? Time would tell, from my vantage point it looked like the great bird took to a tree further down stream. The chase was on!
   The brush along the river is booby trapped with barbed seed pods that cling to clothing with a devilish Velcro ferocity. Already I resembled a human Chiapet. After an ankle bending hundred yards it was time to stick my neck out and see if the big bird was still in the neighborhood. There it was, perched in a tree and out in the open. I scooted back up the bank and moved further along until a flat opening presented itself. I was trembling, my nerves were juiced with adrenalin and the eagle bounced madly teetering on the long end of the 400mm lens. No way was I going to get a clear shot hand held, not at a decent ISO and the low shutter speed the dreary day called for. Finally I rested the camera on the ground with the lens propped up on my knit cap and turned on the LED display screen. It was exasperating fumbling with this primitive set up before the bird showed in the view finder and held steady aim by way of scrunching my cap in various configurations. I put the shutter on a two second delay and clicked. Blurred. I needed better focus. Increasing the LED's magnification I twisted the focus ring until the magnificent bird sharpened. I clicked again and at the count of two the deed was done.
   Now I got greedy. I had this angle in the bag, could I move to a better vantage point and improve the background? I slithered out of my hide and scrambled through the woods. About fifty yards further down the line there was a little rise by a utility easement. The Bald eagle still clinging to it's branch was now framed by White birch. What I wouldn't have given for my tripod and remote shutter release. The big bird held steady for a couple of nervous shots before taking to wing and just like that, the moment was over.
   I walked home with that triumphant glow every lucky bird photographer has shared, in spite of prickling with the million stubborn burrs clinging to my grimy trousers and shirt.
   What a wonderful world it can be!

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World Bird Wednesday XLVIII

2011-10-18T10:30:00.046-04:00

I Love You Just the Way You Are!

Little Tiny Feet

If Hollywood had been in charge of designing the Belted Kingfisher, instead of the haphazard bump and grind of evolutionary tectonics, it would sport talons at least on par with a parakeet or sparrow instead of the little tiny feet it has been stuck with. Where's Intelligent Design when you need it? It's not the first time evolution has made mistakes like this. T-Rex jumps immediately to mind with it's dainty fore-limbs to stunted to pick it's own teeth or scratch the back of it's considerable head. Check Godzilla for a sensible T-Rex redo.
Of course, small feet are considered very desirable by the Geisha's of Japan to the point where they intentionally crunch their toes into ill fitting slippers rather than suffer the stigma of unfashionably out sized clodhoppers. A Geisha would think the kingfishers feet perfectly in proportion to it's size. I would agree to disagree. Besides, the fierce nature of the kingfisher is more in line with a Samaria warrior than a refined lady of culture.
The Belted kingfisher's blazing airborne attacks, carried out with a acrobatic deftness, defy anything fabricated in Hollywood's computer generated action movies. Indeed, a gritty hero crashing headlong into troubled waters, impaling the woeful with a black saber, and flying off to beat the day lights out of it's stunned victim on a rock, could more or less pass for a movie plot these days.

Hitchcock may have had a brutal undertone submerged in his story lines but his implied violence was in context and not the sole point. Sir Alfred reminds me of another of the kingfishers design flaws. Yes, their immense heads. Here's Hollywood's master plan for a more telegenic kingfisher: Shrink the head, enlarge the feet, lengthen the tail feathers, give the eyes a red glare, and chrome the beak! Yeah, that's what we'd see, another doped up Tinseltown remake: Revenge of the Kingfisher!

Naturally, I jest. My impertinent discontent can be traced to the research into the Belted kingfisher's clan that I did this week. My knowledge concerning ornithology has holes in it the size of Utah and I dare not write about birds without a back up source more authoritative than my own memory.
So it was that I cast my Enet for factoids about the Belted kingfisher, lesser cousin of the vaunted Kookaburra, greatest of all kingfishers. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon an informative article that commented on the ninety different varieties of kingfisher our world has to offer. Was I misinformed? Wasn't there only a single version of the kingfisher in all of Europe, the Common, and one native to North America, the Belted? Not quite, there were a few others, for instance the Ringed and Green kingfishers that reside in the American South West, but those are rare enough to be easily overlooked by the casually educated.
To further hammer down the disparity I then read that only six of the ninety Kingfisher species call the whole of the Western Hemisphere home, while Gambia, an African country of barely 2,400 square miles, claims eight! What an astounding variation in diversity.
One click led to another and I began to find picture after picture of rare kingfishers gorgeously festooned with a dazzling pallet of colorful plumage's. And that is how my drab, slate colored darlings lost some of their visual appeal and made me long for something more...intense.

Some species of kingfisher are unbelievably rare and precious. The Kofiau Paradise kingfisher is resident to only one tiny island, Kofiau, off the coast of New Guinea. The tropics of the Eastern Hemisphere spanning Africa, Asia, and Australia are our planets kingfisher treasure trove.
The world over, these peculiar birds share most of the same general attributes. Those that spring to mind are obvious: long beak, tiny feet, and ill proportioned head. The forest dwelling varieties that dine on insects dug from the earth will sport a stouter bill and feet more useful for standing on Terra Firma. There are mountain and desert versions too. Kingfishers are blessed with acute eyesight although they must turn their heads to direct their line of vision to make up for an inability to move their eyes easily in the socket. Kingfishers are creatures of the air and do not presume to walk on the their tootsies except to scuttle into their nesting burrows.
The drawing on the immediate left is that of the Common Paradise Kingfisher. Now this is what I'm talking about, fashion and function married in an eye popping explosion of cinematic proportions. Just for a change Hollywood, try bringing back Astaire and Rodgers, we could use a little snappy dialog and sophistication. I rest my rant.

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World Bird Wednesday XLVII

2011-10-11T10:30:00.037-04:00

According to Webster...

Michigan's Indian summer season is in full swing. Our temperatures are reaching into the 80's again! It would behoove me to take advantage of this gift and handle some of the upkeep around the house and barn before old man Winter drops the hammer on us. If there's one thing for sure, it's that this mild weather won't last forever. The temptation however; shuck mundane responsibilities and wander off into the fields and streams to witness the spectacular end of the growing season. Michigan is ablaze with a leafy transcendence. Not every year is so remarkable for it's Autumn color as this one is. Each individual leaf bears a complicated pallet. It is a tradition here to save a few gem quality examples, leaves we simply can not leave behind, and press them forever between the folds of our six inch thick, ninety year old Webster's New World Unabridged Dictionary. Of my possessions, this book with its chiseled covers is the most hotly contested item between my children when they debate the fallout of my inevitable decline. (If you catch my drift.) They finally brought the issue to me for a decision; which of them would inherit the three thousand sheaves of rice paper that constitute its vast knowledge? I so ruled: At Thanksgiving or Christmas, after I am gone, my son and daughter shall play a game of scrabble to determine possession of the hallowed dictionary for the following year. Forevermore. So it is said, so it is written!
If they'd like to practice for those future battles, their Eighty-nine and one half year old Grandma, reigning champion of the letters, is open for appointments!

What is it about American bitterns, just how reclusive can a bird be? Apparently extremely so. I checked with Saginaw Bay Birding and found that they had only one sighting reported for a bittern all year. I have seen three! The latest example was the bird hidden in a roadside weed bed at Shiawassee Refuge. The bird did not flush and we faced off for a good photo session. My concentration broke when a Night jar cruised in and I fought with my camera to reset the shutter speed for a bird in flight shot. The distraction lasted maybe 20 seconds but when I looked back to regain my vigil, the phantom of the marsh had dematerialised. Crafty devil!

I hope my revised comment board choice is now more inclusive! I appreciate reading your words of wisdom and truly, all the hard working bloggers that contribute to WBW deserve our kind words.

One of the weakness/strengths of WBW is that our focus is on bird life, a regular contributor, the phenomenal Pat Ulrich has recently been posting pictures of his travels in Yellowstone National Park. Pat's photographs of the great beasts of the American West are a Masters course in nature photography.

I unabashedly recommend everyone click on Pat Ulrich Photography to enjoy some great eye candy.

Great days! The migration, I'm happy to report, has arrived in Saginaw Valley!

Now it's time for World Bird Wednesday!

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

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

Come on it's your turn!

World Bird Wednesday XLVI

2011-10-04T10:30:00.020-04:00

More Then Meets the Eye

Autumn is in full swing along the banks of the Pine River, the birds are massing in great flocks taking advantage of the harvest season to bulk up for the long flights south, temperatures are slipping into the low forties as the night hours lengthen bringing a early end to our apple picking and leaf raking chores. It is a unimaginably golden world we make our way through. The agreement between green leaf and sun to partake in the sacrament known by the awkward word "photosynthisis" is quickly coming to it's fiery conclusion. It would be well if you were with me to see the kalaidiscope of color with your own eyes. My trips into the wetlands are equally as beautiful. I am waiting to see the giant flocks of geese that are even now making there way to Shiawassee refuge. I have never seen a snow goose and if I read the pamphlets correctly that oversight will be corrected a thousand times over very soon. I have had good looks at pairs of trumpeter swans resting in the marsh and flights of Sandhill cranes popping up unexpectedly on the stubble fields, there finding plenty of left overs to keep them happy after our farmers have taken in the crops. Between the blowing leaves, Wild turkey and deer bombing back and forth across the road, along with the ultimate distraction of the spectacular red, orange, and yellow hardwoods I'm having trouble keeping my car in it's own lane.

On the shores of Lake Huron I spied a group of Black-bellied plovers in their non-breeding molt working the shore line. They are powerful fliers capable of scooting along at 50mph even in the face of a strong head wind. Their breeding grounds skirt the rim of the Arctic ocean where the plover may lay 1 to 5 eggs. Remarkably, the newly hatch Black-bellied plovers are able to feed themselves within a days time and are ready to take to the air in about three weeks. These birds are long lived in the wild with life spans in the neighborhood of 20 years. This 11 inch shorebirds halting stutter step as it patrols the beach and its bulbous profile give no hint that in the air it's 27 inch wingspan can support nonstop migratory flights figuring thousands of miles. The inset picture shows the Black-bellied plover in it's more distinctive breeding plumage.

I have been reading recently about the "Market Hunters" that harvested wild game in the 1800's all through North America. There was a huge market for anything from bears to frogs and nearly everything in between that might feed the 76 million hungry mouths that populated turn of the century America. There was no season and no bag limit. The inexpensive meat was iced or salted and sent by rail to the cities where it was sold to the poor or prepared in wild game restaurants. So efficient were the killing methods developed, the disseminated flocks of avian life and throngs of wild beasts nearly vanished in a unthinkable cataclysm. If not for the efforts of naturalists and enlightened hunters in the waining moments of the 19th century much of our glorious native wild life would be nothing more than faded pictures on the pages of century old field guides and hunting magazines. The Migratory Bird Act of 1918 put an end to the slaughter of shorebirds like the plovers. The concept that natures treasurers were finite and belonged to nature and not to man's arrogant consumptive whims was revolutionary. I shudder to think, what if this new mindset had not caught on?

Now it's time for World Bird Wednesday!

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

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World Bird Wednesday XLV

2011-09-27T10:30:00.359-04:00

White-Headed Warblers?

I was encouraged by "those in the know" to visit three Warbler hot-spots last week. The migration, according to Saginaw Bay Birding, is in full swing and the tantalizing lists of warbler species recently sighted by reputable birders are lengthy. My mind was full of a fervent ambition to scramble though the thickets, click away at a wide variety of warblers, I.D.ing them in the field guide, and joyously adding bird after bird to my life list. So why, you might ask, are there eagle pictures on my WBW post? In this weeks considerable wanderings I saw only one bird that even remotely resembled the hotly expected warblers and it fluttered away long before I could raise camera to eye. Is it any wonder then, my imagination boiling with anticipation, that when I first observed these eagles through a long and murky distance I mistook them for white headed warblers? Had I been correct it would have caused delirium in the birding world since out of the 119 species there is no such thing as a White-headed warbler. I thought I had number 120. Never one to let the facts get in the way of a good story, (my children will confirm my favorite dinosaur as the Thesaurus,) I did not feel confident in perpetuating a hoax. However; I wasn't altogether disappointed when I expertly deduced I had Bald eagles in my sights especially when, through the alabaster skies, a second bird joined the first.

These eagles were waiting for me at the entrance to the Shiawassee Wildlife Refuge. I stayed far away until my camera was primed for shooting a bird in the cloudy light. Is the light ever right? Isn't it always to cloudy or to sunny? In the year since owning a Dslr I've complained way to much about the trials and tribulations of natural lighting. Maturity is coming and rather than thinking about the deficits of difficult conditions I am trying to maximise the advantages. The challenge with these eagles was primarily not blowing the opportunity, to get something. We expect the pounding heart beat and the manic twisting of lenses, knobs and dials but there is no picture if in your enthusiasm you scare away the object of your desire! I rolled up very slowly and smoothly in my little car making my way to a point about 150 feet away from the dead tree the first eagle was perched on. I slipped my tripod out the car window and set the camera on it. Stupid me, the remote shutter release was in the trunk and might just as well have been on the moon as I could not risk getting out of the car. The work around was to put the camera shutter on a two second delay to insure the camera was rock steady when pictures were taken. Great! The bird was calm and in a few minutes the jumble of ISO, shutter speed, and F stop came together to produce detailed pictures of the stationary eagle. Just then I heard a ruckus and the second eagle swooped in. Though I managed some pictures they were horribly blurred because my camera was honed for a still setting. The eagles settled on the two stumps and I was back in business again. There was a little hole in the cloud cover I prayed would cast some bright light on the the scene but it never materialised. At the entrance to the refuge a car pulled up and I knew would have to share this blissful scene. I was pretty sure the birds would take flight so I quickly bumped my shutter speed up to 1/2000, the ISO to 800, and the F stop down to it's lowest setting of 5.6 and fired off a couple test shots. I held my breath as the car drove up. The birds flustered and one rose off its perch. Their cries pierced the air. It was a magnificent experience photography aside. Even better when you can share the moment!

Now it's time for World Bird Wednesday!

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

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

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World Bird WednesdayXLIV

2011-09-20T10:30:00.030-04:00

Turn On, Tune In, Don't Drop the Fish

Oh, this poor heron. She nailed a Gar pike right behind the head with a perfect shot and worked hard getting her prize into position to swallow it. Just when it looked like the day had been won, the injured fish slipped free, hit the water, and revived. Our heron, now in a panic, dove in pursuit but it was not to be. You could feel the frustration in her heated leg kick when she knew the fish was lost. Herons don't usually act out their disappointments with outbursts bordering on tantrums. I really thought this bird needed to "chill out" and I might have been able to help her in that regard if only she could have come over this evening.

While thinking about what I might want to write about for WBW this week I set the mood for my efforts in that direction by turning on my Lava Lamps. Yes, I'll come clean, I have a Lava Lamp collection. I also have a pretty damn good YoYo collection and, Oh yeah, about 40 antique Schwinn bikes in the barn all ready to ride. The YoYo's and bicycles are what I term intentional collections, I set out to acquire the pieces with a purpose and a cause. Lava Lamps are quite different in the sense that they find me, no active searching on my part is involved. I am blessed with them and even my frustrated and hungry heron friend would ultimately mellow out in the presence of their hypnotic pulsations.

Lava lights are an icon of the 60's Hippie movement, therefore; at their essence, is a innocent psychedelic silliness. These old relics of mine come to light at yard sales and resale shops. They wait for me; their caps missing and bulbs burnt out. I feel like the Lava Lights modern day Statue of Liberty calling out, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teaming store. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my molten lamp beside thy golden door!"

The first Lava lamp was discovered endlessly melting in an English pub by Craven Walker just after WWII. He found it to be the life's work of a Mr. Dunnett who was unfortunately deceased. A Singapore inventor, Mr. Walker took the "contraption made out of a cocktail shaker, old tins and things," and worked to perfect its mysterious mixtures of colored oils and wax. The Lava Lamps time arrived with the Swinging Sixties and his business, the Crestworth Company of Dorset, England sold millions and still manufactures them today.

It's interesting that my love of Lava lamps and bird photography began around the same time a few years ago. What drives these little interests of mine, what compels me to collect things, whether they be Lava lamps, bicycles, yoyos, or bird photographs, is beyond me. Is there a logic or thread of commonality to these seemingly random, compulsive collections? When asked to describe the appeal of his Lava Lamps Mr. Walker explained, "It starts from nothing, grows possibly a little bit feminine, then a little bit masculine, then breaks up and has children. It's a sexy thing." I suppose that's it!

The trick is to mix the correct bulb with the right lamp to acquire the perfect melt.

Now it's time for World Bird Wednesday!

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

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

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World Bird WednesdayXLIII

2011-09-13T10:36:00.020-04:00

The Meaning of the Molt

How is your molting coming along this morning? These threadbare turkeys, roaming through the secretive cover of the tall grass in the Shiawassee Nature Refuge late last week, are well into their juvenile molt but not so far along that their neck feathers have come in completely. Fortunately food is plentiful these late Summer days with so many insects buzzing about and wild flowers going to seed, all helping to sustain this runaway growth spurt. The massive weight gain a young turkey undergoes that first summer coupled with the physiological act of producing enough feathers to lift it's body into flight is impressive even in perfect conditions. Juvenile turkeys go through three moltings the first year and two a year after that. The full adult molt is taking place right now and the pre-nuptial molt, highlight of the turkey calender, takes place in late winter.

Ever sensitive to a change in season, Suzanne informs me she will soon be molting out of her skimpy summer wardrobe and into her sweaters, skirts, and boots. That transformation will occur in the mysterious, ever evolving place that is her closet. Rather than molting, I on the other hand, simply add or subtract layers of blue or green colored clothing as the temperature demands! We have evolved in strangely different ways Suz' and I.

It's easy to see how the turkey was coerced into lending it's name to the Turkey vulture. Having a bald faced neck end like that would make anyone a little self-conscious in the company of anyone but a vulture.

Red tailed hawks are also deep into their molt. I saw this prime example along the highway on my way home. Why hawks love their roadside perches so well is anybodies guess but it sure works out for me. Shouldn't they avoid the traffic noise and seek more isolated meadows?This bird gave me ample opportunity to get the long exposures necessary for a good picture in the cloudy light. Rather than to few feathers this Buteo seems to be exploding with them, it's fluffed out expanse of chest feathers reminiscent in girth to a Great-horned owl. Feathers are made of keratin, a substance not unlike plastic hence their water resistant ruggedness.

This female Bobolink sports a wonderfully subtle and well groomed plumage while the male bobolinks are currently undergoing a messy post breeding wardrobe change. Keeping a set of feathers flight ready is a full time job. They must be washed, dusted, preened and straightened. Natures magnificent logic can be appreciated in the orderly replacement of a birds feathers through molting. Tail feathers in most cases are replaced symmetrically two at a time from the center of the fan outwards towards the edges, an arrangement that keeps a bird flight worthy and maneuverable. A woodpecker however, relies on it's center two tail feathers to counter balance it's body as it hammers a tree trunk. The molting process for woodpeckers is thusly reversed, the outside feathers are developed first until they can temporarily lend support when the center feathers are eventually dropped. Some larger birds shed all their flight feathers at once making them particularly vulnerable for a short time. The logic here being that the loss of even a few flight feathers during a prolonged molt would compromise their flight characteristics to greatly for to long a period of time. While we conjecture; Wisdom has dictated: Flock together and tough out the complete overhaul!
Do humans Molt? The lifespan of a skin cells is approximately 35 days before it is jettisoned. Ours is a continuous molt that sees our fleshy spare tires retreaded and shredded more than ten times a year. Upon hearing this news Suzanne quips,"Is that what I've been vacuuming up around here? No more molting in the house!"

Now it's time for World Bird Wednesday!

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

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

#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 compadres!

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World Bird Wednesday XLII

2011-09-06T10:30:00.133-04:00

The Fall of Summer

There came this week to Michigan, a little crack in Summers resolve to burn the world asunder. There is evidence everywhere that the issues separating summer and fall have turned chilly: Night comes more quickly now, the apples in our orchard are ripening, and Suzanne has already put up the first batch of jam from the early grapes. The Harvest season is underway for the other creatures of the North country too. The thistle is blooming purple, and as it browns to seed, the molting Goldfinches are purposefully ripping the flossy pods to shreds. I am transfixed by their work as the white fluff flies. It is a messy job, a lot like being the Grape Jelly Master's humble assistant.

Getting a picture of the thistle harvest has proved to be more of a job than I would have anticipated. The first chance out I confidently gathered up a load of brightly illuminated, high sun shots, all defective it turned out by reason of poor resolution. Autofocus was useless, it's single minded electronics dithering with the high contrast, hodge podge tangle of sharp thorns and purple blooms. The twitchy yellow darts made a mockery of my high tech advantages for while I was seeing interesting pictures they were not in my camera at days end. Placing the focusing duties back into my own hands, on the third try, everything fell into place; in the fading light of a Canadian cold front, one of early Autumn's fanciful sights was preserved like the Concord grapes in Suzanne's Pine River jam!

I was surprised to see a pair of Greater Yellow Legs poking their out sized beaks into the shallows searching for a good meal at Shiawassee Nature Refuge. A lifer for me, I debated as I rifled through my Audubon bird guide, was it a Greater or Lesser Yellow Legs? After much deliberation fretting through beak length issues, I finally settled my inner debate with a coin flip. Heads up determined it to be a Greater Yellow Legs. I did not practice science here.
I have a new secret weapon in my camera bag. I bought a polarized lens filter. It makes pictures look like your seeing them through your best sunglasses. I have to long been suffering from incessant beak glare! My local camera shop guy was amused this reasonably priced piece of gear had escaped my attention. When I buy expensive equipment I find it hard not to jump on Internet deals but for just about everything else, I buy local. It's fun to have the ear of a professional to discuss arcane issues with. I, in turn, can give the shop bound counter folk a heads up on the hot spots out in the field. A good example of one hand washing the other!

Going postal?
This disgruntled Belted kingfisher could be wearing the classic blue uniform of the United States Postal Service. This is not the guy I would intentionally come to blows with but the Kingbird (below) is willing to test wits with him.

Fred T. Jencks writes in his memories from 1881: "The Kingfisher had poised himself several times to look for fish, and was just moving to do so again as the Kingbird approached and attacked him. The Kingfisher is not a troublesome bird, and always minds his own business. He was entirely unprepared, and acted as though he could not believe that the other had any evil intentions, for he tried to poise again. The second attack seemed to undeceive him, and show him his enemy was in earnest. He vaulted and turned, vainly endeavoring to rid himself of his persecutor. He soon saw he could not save himself by flight and tried diving. As soon, however, as he appeared at the surface he attempted to fly, but the Kingbird, keeping up an incessant twittering, forced him to dive again. Two or three times this was repeated, both birds making considerable noise, until the Kingfisher seemed convinced that escape in that direction was impossible, so he sat like a duck upon the surface, and as his persecutor would swoop at him he would go under. This lasted for some little time, until even the Kingbird seemed wearied and flew away."

Now it's time for World Bird Wednesday!

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

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

#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 compadres!

Please consider submitting one of your older "hall of fame" posts to a fresh audience.

Come on it's your turn!

WBWXLI

2011-08-30T10:30:00.088-04:00

Perceptions From a Lost Continent

All summer long I have been out in the fields and wetlands scoping out birds to photograph. While I am always on the look out for the exotic, it is the ordinary residents of our estuaries that fill in the long droughts between between more remarkable sightings. It is a major part of the challenge of nature photography to capture a common species in a new light. Case in point, my old lovers, the Blue heron and Great egrets. The long and lean supermodels of Michigan swamps are everywhere prancing knee deep in the shallows with that quirky runway gate. I have reams of these stately, statuesque birds locked in stoic poses, but the captures I truly go gaga for are the victorious "fish-in-beak" shots. In the long swirling whirlpool off my photographic DNA I have been predisposed to taking picture after picture of these giant, frame filling birds when I probably should be spending the gift of my free time in search of rarer quarry.
   I recently showed one of my prized Great Blue photos to a duck hunting pal and to my horror he tore at my heart with his quick cutting comment, "That is one hell of an ugly bird!"
   He could have slammed the looks of my first born with no less effect. The fog of my loving gaze lifted and I could see what he meant; the long skinny legs, disproportionate beak, and the hot little coals it calls eyes may not be considered charming by everyone. I wanted to hurt him back with a sharp quip denigrating his beloved ducks but it was no use, my mind was shaken blank with this frank perception.
   I suppose those beautifully lanky, near emaciated human supermodels might be worth a cautious, more dispassionate second look as well. Are they really so pretty or merely hanger thin stick figures disguising their structural oddities with luxurious plumage too?
   I wonder!

Most every evening I'm in Midland I'll stop over by the Eagle ponds to see if I can reel in a decent juvenile photo. Today I got lucky and managed to lock lens on Raggedy Ann, the roughest looking of the young eagles crowding the air. No rail thin supermodel here, just a rugged killing machine. Even given the advantage of my hilltop observation post these birds seem to materialise out of thin air and often give me a start. A distracted photographer would be easy prey for one of these ten pound missiles zinging in from the stratosphere. Go ahead, laugh at the thought, eagles hunting humans does seem preposterous, but the Polynesians who first inhabited the South Island of New Zealand had just such a horror to contend with. New Zealand was our planets only avian dominated mini-continent, here nature dealt a radical evolutionary wild card: only two types of bats accounted for the isolated islands entire population of mammals; no cats, no rats, no dogs, none of that nasty big brained behavior to compete with. Bird life thus reigned supreme and flourished unhindered. Picture, if you will, tree covered mountain slopes giving way to vast Savannah valleys thickly populated with a variety of flightless birds topping out in shear size with the 400 pound 12 foot tall Moa bird.

The apex predator of this isolated world was Haasts Eagle, the "Tiger of the Sky," a massive airborne meat eater at least triple the weight of the Bald eagle. It was not so much a soaring bird as my local eagles are, the Haasts had a stubbier profile on it's ten foot wing span designed for flapping flight, propelling it through the tight forest canopy at speeds in excess of 50 mph. It's striking power was calculated to be roughly that of a cinder block dropped from an eight storey building. The length of it talons and ferocity of grip was on par with the Bengal tiger. While this bird was thought to be an example of aboriginal mythology by the first European explorers, modern DNA science has rendered ancient Maori cave drawings accurate, a man eating eagle did exist on the New Zealand Archipelago.
I kid you not!

Bone specimen analysis indicate the Haasts kill move was a devastating one two punch. The giant Moa bird was dropped cold with a pelvis crushing body blow delivered with the first set of talons followed by a skull piercing head shot with the next. This aerial assault proved equally effective on human beings. The giant eagle would then linger over it's kill like an African lion. That's the privilege of being the apex predator, complete mealtime serenity.
I think you get the gruesome picture, man arrives on a lost continent H.G. Wells would have been proud to conjure, becoming a tasty new entree for the mighty Flying Tiger. Sad to say, the Maori oral history describing small humans being snatched up and flown away to feed hungry nestlings is true. Unfortunately for the Haasts eagle the Maori people adored feasting on the grazing Moa birds and their herbivorous ilk, hunting them into extinction. No Moa, pardon the pun. The doomed Haasts eagle, thought to comprise only 1000 pairs in the best of times, clicked lights out on New Zealand's fantastic lost world of the birds a mere five hundred years ago.

The BBC produced a little docu-drama about the man hunting exploits of the gigantic Haasts eagle, here is frighteningly realistic two an one half minute morsel of it for you. Safe journey!

Thank you for your overwhelmingly kind response to my comments last week about the challenges facing the fire service in Detroit. I have read your thoughts again and again.
Our local TV news did a story on the visit Fire Commissioner Austin had at our engine house and I thought you might find it interesting as a follow up to last weeks post. Yes, I have a non-speaking role in it, about a two second shot at the table calculated to emphasize our aging man power before our young firefighting prodigy Perry rightfully dominates the screen! This is footage taken at my wonderful 112 year old firehouse where WBW is fussed over many a late night.
Click here to view news reporter Charlie LaDuff's informative video!

Now it's time for World Bird Wednesday!

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

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

#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 compadres!

Please consider submitting one of your older "hall of fame" posts to a fresh audience.

Come on it's your turn!

World Bird Wednesday XL

2011-08-23T10:30:00.023-04:00

A Meditation

As Diane Arbus, the great photographer of unusual people, once said,"I never get the picture I take, it's always better or worse." Ain't that the truth!
I had a great day watching young Bald eagles soaring in a very high and bright sky. I clicked picture after picture knowing full well I was getting loads of muddy dark shapes pasted against white backgrounds to stuff the virtual waste basket with. It was probably one of those days more suited to nature appreciation then photography. Still, you never know what might shake out. The big birds were scrapping high in the sky testing each others verve. Tracking them in the long lens was fun and got downright exciting when the juveniles swooped low. "If only the light was better!" How often have you thought that? One odd ball picture of the young eagles passing straight overhead turned out better than the others and serves as a remembrance of the day. You can bet the house note I will eventually get the job done taking their picture. I spotted nine juveniles in the air at one time! Where did they all come from? I'm thinking the adults had a stellar season child rearing and that is good news indeed.

I hung around all day hoping that by evening the sun would be low enough to throw some defining luminescence on the young eagles. As if playing a practical joke, the buggers road the thermals right out of town or sat frozen in far away trees when the perfect light finally showed golden.

A flight of geese left the pond and I snapped off a few shots from a little elevation more out of reflex than anything. Amusing reflections maybe, but when you have eagles on your mind that hardly satisfies the great expectations. Then good fortune struck, the kind of unexpected visitation that whips a nature photographer into a frenzy. Buzzing around the hill and flashing white wing markings a small flock of Night hawks descended! From trying to solve the problem of catching the slow glide of a dark juvenile eagle to tracking the manic maneuverings of a tiny Night hawk is quite a shift. Funny, a little panic struck me. Don't blow this opportunity! I have been schooled at the hand of serendipity, these unplanned moments are a tease, seldom do they last long enough to record them successfully. In a New York minute the hawks moved along, the sun set, and I went home to unlock my camera's treasure chest to see if what rattled inside was silver or lead.

Common Nighthawk, Chordeiles minor

While there has been plenty of fun a feild it's been in rough contrast to my work days in Detroit. The shifts are crushing; thirteen shootings in a single day, the kind with bullets not cameras; bleeding people knocking on the firehouse door looking for sanctuary from their assailants; nameless bodies in burnt out vacant houses; and the fires, my god, day after day it goes on. Our fire engine is so beat up the compartment doors are held shut with cloths line. The power steering leaks like a sieve, it feels as though my wrists will break clutching the wheel as we careening around the pot holes in the road, there are no mechanics to make repairs. Our new Fire Commissioner stopped by one morning for a fireside chat. He comes to us from sunny Los Angeles and does not know Midwest post industrial madness very well. When a 19 year veteran of the Detroit fire wars, a guy with a necklace of burn scars around his throat asks him about fire house closings and the sorry state of our infrastructure, the Comish pleads budget constraints and suggests that if this fire fighter isn't up to it, maybe he should find a different line of work. My jaw drops in disbelief at the obvious insult my brothers question received. Our new Southern Californian boss hasn't even experienced winter yet, sopping wet and flash frozen in brutal January cold snaps. We laugh at his naive bravado.

For me bird photography is meditation. I sit silently and observe. Sometimes I bring a picture back but always I leave something more substantial behind. Michigan's wetlands are filled with my grief and weariness. Mine is a confusing world, and right at the moment the absurdity of it feels particularly perilous and threatening. Those little pockets of time when sanity reigns and the bones of my resolve can thicken again are all the more precious. It doesn't really matter if the pictures come out or not.

It is WBWXXXX. Of all the wonderful things in my life this is one of the most unexpected and inspiring. The anticipation of the peaceful moments spent with you observing and discussing that which is beautiful and intriguing helps to frame my thoughts while fighting the good fight all week long. Thank you for sharing! I am grateful.

Now it's time for World Bird Wednesday!

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 WBW. Or you can copy this link on to your blog page to share W.B.W. 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 Linky.

#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 incourage your compadres!

Please consider submitting one of your older "hall of fame" posts to a fresh audiance.

Come on it's your turn!

World Bird Wednesday XXXIX

2011-08-16T10:30:00.009-04:00

Taking the Long View

American Bittern (Botaurus lentiginosus)

Those superbly detailed close-ups we enjoy week after week on WBW are the nature photographer's sexy new lover. Brand new cameras overstuffed with mega-pixels and lightening fast auto-focus lenses produce mind boggling results. On top of that comes the guilty pleasure of post processing, upping the ante even further as we sharpen, crop, and saturate to our hearts content. Those glistening eye highlights and finely sharpened feather textures will stop even a non-nature lover in their tracks.

"Did you take that?" They gasp in astonishment.

Little do they know of our dirty little secret. It's the technology, stupid!

Only recently have these magical powers been bestowed on photographers by the fast advance of digital photography. Have you seen the dragonfly and hummingbird pictures out there? When but now has that been possible?

I remember sitting in front of the TV in 1964 when The Beatles took the stage on The Ed Sullivan Show. The girls went mad with an emotional upheaval that was louder than the rock and roll they came to enjoy. Every TV connected kid made up their mind in that moment to become a musician. I could think of nothing else, it pierced me like eagle talons. That madness was to grip me again 47 years later when I happened upon an epic picture of a Great egret flipping a frog into the air before munching it down. The perfectly focused close-up of the frogs flight was frozen in super natural clarity. I was agog that such a spine tingling picture was possible without the financial backing of The National Geographic Society. I went stupid with desire to take a picture like that. Just like 1964, I researched and fretted over the purchase of equipment I did not know how to use. Patiently I rehearsed the skills that were described in the articles and slowly, every now and then, I would take a picture that showed I was getting closer to the kind of results I yearned for.

I admit it, I was smitten with a child like desire to be the guy who gives the world those pictures.

It occurred to me last week that this overwhelming desire to take closer and more finely detailed pictures could be an artistic dead end, a trap. Not to say the difficult skills involved in applying the latest technology toward producing those crowd pleasing portraits are not worthy of our passion, far from it. The shear emotional appeal of tracking down and locking lens onto birds at close quarters is impossible not to strive for. All the big shooters are running in this race, it takes loads of time and a sizable financial commitment but the chances of having the Happy Accident of taking a truly remarkable picture have never been better. The possibility of crossing a diamond with a pearl; in this case an interesting pose matched with the technical revelations of today's digital breakthroughs, demands our attention. We are seeing pictures never before thought possible. It is so now.

These new macro pictures are, however, not necessarily the most satisfying pictures ever taken. The temptation to get closer can overwhelm other artistic considerations. Context is often lost!

You could hypothetically fill an entire frame with nothing more than the eye of a bug but it's shock value would come more from it's appeal as a science project than an artistic achievement.

"Back up a little!" The thought came into my head with the force of a gong. Why do I so rarely photograph birds in the context of their environment?

Think: Does the limb this bug is perched on belong to a tree or a bush? Is the bush in a forest or a swamp? Is it spring or summer in the swamp? You can't get that information from staring into an eyeball.

On the surface, putting a thing in it's place sounds easy enough to achieve, it should happen often enough just by accident, but as I started rummaging through files looking for pictorial examples I realised to my horror how rigidly focused my concentration on the reckless pursuit of super detailed close-ups is. Where in the name of heaven were all the pictures that reveal birds as an intrinsic part of the natural world?

The Rule of Three!

There is a rule that I have perhaps followed to blindly, a facet of the universal rule of threes that states: A birds image should take up 1/3 of the total frame to be seen properly. While it's still a good rule, overdoing it tends to make every picture look like it was taken for a field guide.

The rules of three are broken at your own risk. Even the Beatles spoke of their musical ramifications. Notice how the last phrase in the lyrics of Beatle songs repeats three times at the end of their myriad three minute hits. Start with "She Loves You" and "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and continue right on through "Strawberry Fields Forever." It works.

In photography the rock solid rule of thirds reveals the secrets of a well composed picture too. Slicing our pictures equally from top to bottom and from side to side, like a tic-tac-toe board, will show the lines overlapping in four places, at the perfect thirds. Ordinarily one of those points is where the focus of a well composed picture will be. When a illustration has a little more air in it, and the subject takes only a small percentage of the full frame, this rule becomes paramount. Following it inexplicably helps to focus the power of a composition. It is heady stuff.

This important facet of the rule of thirds is explained in depth by clicking HERE!

Lascaux, France we have been hooked on pictures. From charcoal and blood to the electronic blips of digital photography we have developed increasingly exacting ways to reinvent the artistic endeavours of our ancestors. Technologies advances are well documented in the demanding speciality of bird photography. As we look deeper into today's hypnotic macro realms don't forget the challenge of taking a step back and showing your subject as part of a larger picture.

Why the superpowers never sent a poet into space I'll never know, but they did send cameras. Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders achieved one of the greatest pictures ever taken with his Earth Rise image. He took the long view and changed the way thinking people regard our planetary home forever. As photographers we owe much to the Techies. They provide new ways for the creative mind to snatch relevance from the chaos. As it never has before, technology makes it possible to capture the wonder of planet Earth in wonderful clarity.

It's our planet, lets go take its picture!

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!

Credit: NASA

Now it's time for World Bird Wednesday!

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

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

#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 incourage your compadres!

Come on it's your turn!

World Bird Wednesday XXXIIX

2011-08-09T10:30:00.077-04:00

Barbarians at Their Gates

   The doldrums of summer have covered Michigan like thick hot syrup on a stack of dry flour pancakes. It is hard to move let alone think; even the grass is tired of growing. Yesterday I tried to fight the malaise, threw my camera and water bottles into the car and sped off for the wetlands determined to find something to photograph.
   My journey took me first to Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge. All the many rivers in the Saginaw watershed mingle here before washing out into Lake Huron by way of the Saginaw river. This is sanctuary for roughly 280 bird species throughout the year. In the autumn, tens of thousands of geese and ducks flock to Shiawassee during migration. "Globally Significant," is how the official pamphlet touts it. The views are vast here and my 400mm lens isn't quite up to the challenge of pulling in the marquee Sandhill cranes and Trumpeter swans lounging in the lazy distance. This is a refuge, and while I normally would have stalked closer, that kind of nonsense is strictly verboten!
   On the authorised trail, where I tramped into the secluded photographic blind, the canny fowl skittered away long before I was properly stowed away in that tiny wooden shack; huddled there to wait silently with the spiders and the flies for those prime bird photo opportunities that would never come. Showing their exquisite good taste, the insects, themselves far from miserable, threw a grand party delighting in their yummy human cuisine.
    The heat and the claustrophobia grew. A hallucination swept over me; I was a chain gang prisoner steaming in a solitary sweat box fretting out my "failure to communicate." Through the tiny slats cut into the wooden cell I could see the Boss man rocking in the shade of his porch, sipping a cool lemonade with ol' Blue the trusty blood hound lounging contentedly at his feet, lately worn out from running me down.
   I got the hell out of there.

As I think about it now, this strange illusion probably had its sprouting in the latest real life run in I had with the good folks at Dow Chemical security. To capsulise a little history: There is a hill in a public park which overlooks the chemical plants retention ponds, ponds that are crowded with bird life, ponds that are owned by Dow Chem. When Dow security is feeling frisky they will send their uniformed patrolmen out into Overlook park to question my motives in having a Dslr with a 400mm lens in my hot little hands. They only do this if I'm alone on the hill taking bird pictures. In a now famous slow chase, Dow's security cars once followed me home from the ponds. I drove at a deliberately slow 20mph crawl the whole way just to spite them, they never budged from my bumper. Yes, there is history here.
I was on my way up there again two evenings ago testing out a camera pack that velcros onto my 10 speed's rear bike rack. Tooling down our scenic woodland bike trail in route, I pulled up hither and yon to whip out the camera and take a few pictures. The new system was working fine, I could dismount, yank out the camera, push over the bike, and be shooting inside 15 seconds. It was a pretty evening to be at play, the golden hour's sunlight would be shinning upon the birds that call Dow Chemical home and I was on my way to my Overlook Park battlegrounds where I hoped to take some butt kickin' pelican photos. Perfect.

I'm sure my buddies at Dow Chem Security are still talking about how they scrambled to converge on the intruder at the fence line. I was quickly pegged sneaking up on my ten speed to snap off long distance reconnaissance photos, no doubt. I imagine them monitoring the hill from their guard shack nerve center, dispatching their own muscle before calling the County Sheriffs when potential corporate spies arrive.
And so it goes again, two county sheriffs, two burly security dudes and I debating abstract legal theory, case in point: Who owns the air above Dow chemical and the photographic rights to the birds there in? These debates used to be amusing, they've become tedious. Why does Dow insists on having this inane confrontation over and over again when they admit I am doing nothing illegal and must put up with my tongue lashings before watching me peddle off Scott free to click away another day? The police assure me their heavy handed tactics will persist in spite of my impertinent objections.
Lest you think me immune to this treatment, the real pressure comes not from Dow but from those dear to me; poor Suzanne who worries I'm calling down corporate hellfire and even the boys at the firehouse, where we discuss the topic ad nauseum, are ticked off. They have great fun badgering me on in my singular pursuit of happiness. I am impressed how brave they are for me.
Improbable conspiracy theories abound, but wait, is that a Dow car slowing down in front of the house?

You know, I thank heaven all summer long for Blue herons. They are Michigan's most dependable bird. In the dog days, when nothing else is flying they'll give you at least a fighting chance for a cool jpeg. The lead picture in this posting is one taken by my son Joshua I'm proud to say, the 'kid' who fights fires with his old man in Detroit. Try being the guy inside a burning building who also has to worry about his aging, one year from retirement Dad falling out while hauling hose in the middle of the night. My daughter Shannon, who earns her way in the field of graphic design, has gently guided me toward the life of a writer and photographer, she sees something there for me, something safer and less dependant on adrenalin. The kids don't question why their goofy Dad takes bird pictures in remote swamps on his days off, they try to understand it and share in it. Their boundless young spirits and creativity energy is impossible for me not to emulate, even if it makes a giant, godlike corporate entity like Dow uncomfortable in the process. In my own small world an issue of respect is at stake.

In reality, I don't want anyone mad at me, especially Blue herons. They're all I have left!

Now it's time for World Bird Wednesday!

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

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

#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 incourage your compadres!

Come on it's your turn!

World Bird Wednesday XXXVII

2011-08-02T10:30:00.033-04:00

In Pursuit of the Green Heron

I had set several goals at the outset of the summer season to concentrate on. Most of them, like my desire to take one of those artful super detailed hummingbird pictures, remain bullet points on my hope list still waiting for nature to bless me with opportunity. If your listening Nature; this is not a veiled compliant lest you think me ungrateful, I am just fine trying to hit the knuckle balls you serve up so unexpectedly on my days in the fields and swamps. Many Thanks!

The unpredictability of this nature photography business is at the heart of it's continuing attraction for me. That being said, there are certain birds, like the Green heron (Butorides virescens), that are agonisingly common yet so fleet and shadowy that what pictures there are of them in my portfolio amount to a collection of mostly near miss, out of focus brown smudges. What gives?

Why is this bird such a hard nut to crack?

My pursuit of Green herons goes back seven years when I purchased my country home on the Pine River as a down payment on my retirement years. Even though I am essentially and more or less contentedly a city boy born and bred on the East side of Detroit, I felt like I needed a hermitage; a place to hide out, to know nature.

Tough town Detroit. I was 14 in 1967 during the Summer Riots when the top blew off Motown, the smoke and gunfire has been a constant companion ever since. Much time was spent in the auto factories and the dingy stamping plants that hammered out rolled steel into fenders. I did not have to serve in the military during the Vietnam war years as my brothers did. There was a draft lotto back then and based on your birthday you received a number 1 through 365. Receiving a "1" meant you and everyone else who shared your birthday would be drafted first. The balls were drawn in a bazaar ceremony where your fate was sealed one way or the other; my ball read 325. I traveled the world instead of going to war between my 17th and 23rd years. Coming back home to stay, the travel bug gone, I hung up my backpack. Through the tangled years I held the fantasy of living on a river and breaking free of my crumbling city. The second I stepped foot on this river property I knew I wanted to be part of it. I acted on that impulse.
It was the call of the wild.

A Green Heron lived on the near bank amongst the jumble of high grass and tree limbs of the Rio Pine when I first called this home. The road to my little house pokes into the Chippewa Nature Area putting me smack inside 1400 acres of unfenced back to nature wetland forest. It was all new and open to me, a great and barely comprehensible playground. I was a door slammer in those days. Every time I excitedly went outside I scared the bejeebies out of every living thing a quarter mile around. The herons especially seemed to know my every move for even when I intended to silently creep up to the high bank and peer over off they'd fly before my hand ever left the door knob. It didn't take me long to realise I had jumped into the deep end of this nature thing and I needed to discover a different kind of silence if I wanted to be more than a clumsy disturbance in this old school neighborhood.
Getting close to a Green heron on the Pine River became the litmus test for my emerging mindset. This could not be rushed.
In this world you get where your going one day at a time.

One could spend a happy lifetime studying Green herons so deep and beautiful are their mysteries. The neck of this bird immediately sets it apart. It folds perfectly and invisibly into the torso morphing the bird into the shape of a chubby gull. Then, whether the neck is unfolded slowly and puffed up in a romantic gesture or explosively catapulted forward spearing a minnow, the spectacle is an unexpected pleasure.

Consider this Green heron controversy some starry night round the campfire...

There are thought to be rare genius level Green herons who have discovered how to bait fish. It has been observed these herons using feathers, bugs, and such articles as they can find to drop on the waters surface from above to attract the curious and hungry minnows upward from the depths. This is tool usage; a very rare occurrence with birds and demonstrates a rising intelligence. Crows also seem to be making this quantum leap forward. They have been seen purposefully dropping walnuts onto busy roads shelling them for easy consumption by using the passing cars as their nutcrackers!

Is this emerging behavior an example of the evolutionary process working it's magic on the Green heron and crow? Have they touched the monolith ala Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey?

No matter your opinion on these issues, how could you not love a bird that poses such intriguing questions?

Joe the Bird Whistler was up to my house recently working on mastering the finer aspects of the Canon Dslr. As he sat quietly on the high bank above the river Joe spotted a Green heron hunting for minnows in the river grass. He waved me over and gave me the heads up. Even then it was tough to see, so well camouflaged was our birds movements through the reeds. We watched for awhile, I asked Joe for the camera and whispered,"I'm going to try and get closer." The high bank on my side of the river is a steep drop of about twenty feet. As quietly and peacefully as I could scuttle down, the first step would be making the shoreline. The Green heron remained steadfast, continuing to stalk the shallows when I finally made the tall grass of the bank. Oh, he knew I was there alright. The line of sight was cluttered with green as I crept closer and closer, a clear view continuing to escape me, my arms growing heavy with the exertion of holding a steady camera while expecting the bird to flush any second. Finally I sat and rested, the heron so close I could have bent over and kissed him. There was a sense of relief when he flew off to the opposite shore.

It is said: You can take the boy out of the city but you can't take the city out of the boy. That's probably why the next morning, still hung over with the transcendence of my close encounter, I forgot and slammed the door on my way out. Joe says I'm still not fully evolved!

Pray tell: Why isn't the Green heron green?

Now it's time for World Bird Wednesday!

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

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

#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 compadres!

Come on it's your turn!

World Bird Wednesday XXXVI

2011-07-26T10:30:00.210-04:00

Breaking News: Pelicans Invade Michigan

Pelicans in Michigan? Preposterous.
A pelican sighting is a strange occurrence around here and worthy of a write up in the local papers when one does fall out of the sky and onto a Michigan lake. It's the kind of thing Grandpa would have reminisced about as he cleaned his dentures before bed, so rare and remarkable was the experience. Such sights are lately becoming more common here in the Lower Peninsula.
I postulate now that American White Pelicans are on the move from the high plains of North Dakota and Manitoba pushing their migratory boundary eastward to include the Great Lakes. Be warned Michigan, it's probably only a matter of time before they start breeding here too. This is my own and highly undocumented sense of the coming storm.
Huge flocks of pelicans congregate for the spring breeding ritual just east of the Canadian Rockies on islands situated inside inland lakes where the rookeries are better protected from predators with a natural mote. Their wintering grounds run along the California/Mexican Pacific rim and the Gulf coast. From my readings I gather that where you find these pelican rookeries you will also see cormorants and gulls as part of the fish loving entourage. On their own, white pelicans can put a beating on a fishery. A single bird, weighing in at thirty pounds, will eat more that half it's body weight in fish daily. Consider also that the birds have mastered the art of hunting in floating packs. When surrounding a school of fish pelicans beat their wings and plunge their bills into the water driving panicked schools shoreward toward the shallows where the feeding frenzy can begin. Hundreds of pounds of fish can be consumed in such a sitting. A mass migration of pelicans would mean a new nightmare for Great Lakes sport fishermen who already pace the floor nightly worrying about the Asian Flying Carp invasion that appears immanent. But that's another story. Michigan's lakes offer the Federally protected pelicans a shining opportunity as their numbers increase again. Who could blame them for being smitten with the Mitten but can we be expected to accommodate these needy immigrants?

Immigration can be a touchy subject depending on what part of the world you live in. As a regions resources dwindle the living must skedaddle or stay to compete in a system whose rules have change. Migration plays a supreme role in the interplay between all living things. Animal, plant, insects, you name it. We generally first experience the issues of immigration in our early days of school when it arrives in the form of the new kid in class.
The new kid's challenge comes down to fitting his puzzle piece securely into a bewildering new picture. The classic suspicious loner.
The class forms a more complicated social structure that must make room for the stranger. They have their vested interests and alliances to consider. Whose point of view should take precedence?
When migration occurs on a larger scale the unsettling dynamics are similar to school yard politics. Emotions get hot, rumors run wild, and the bullies seek a victim.

Immigration and migration is at it's essence the insatiable movement of life around this planet.
We are all immigrants.
Okay tough guy, go ahead and try to put a stop to it.

Pelicans are used to this migration business having seen a lot of it in the 35 million years they have flown the skies of planet Earth. That's about the same time our primitive ape ancestors also set up shop and began their journeys. A lot of creatures have come and gone in the pelicans time. They once fished for saber toothed salmon for goodness sake!
The White European pelican and the American white pelican are extremely similar even though their territories are eight thousand miles distant. It is thought that in those warm pre-ice age days there was a single flock of ancient white pelicans that fed near the warm arctic ocean waters. The group was split in two when the great white North reemerged and pushed them down the two separate continents toward the equator.

The fossil record below is believed to be that of a pelican bill and neck bones from about 30 million years ago, a design so successful we see it today as it was then, virtually unchanged and apparently perfected. For what it's worth Pelicans can claim seniority status in our emerging world.

All of the world's seven varieties of pelicans are spectacular to see in person. The American White variety are among natures largest flying animals with a wing span nearly nine feet across. Their disposition seems to be that of a gentle giant. Due to the loss of suitable wetland habitat pelicans have often been pushed out of their traditional breeding grounds. Are they on the move again, playing the survival game like they have for tens of millions of years? Probably. Thanks this time to those annoying little terrestrially bound apes that have recently evolved into Us, the latest wild card challenge to the White pelicans quest to peacefully fish the wetlands of planet Earth for another thirty thousand millennium.

Now it's time for World Bird Wednesday!

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

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

#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 compadres!

Come on it's your turn!

World Bird Wednesday XXXV

2011-07-19T10:30:00.061-04:00

Bald Eagle: No Big Deal?

"He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed."
Albert Einstein

I was 19 the first time a Bald eagle soared into my world. My career as a vagabond had begun the year before with hitchhikes from Detroit to Florida and then from Motown to L.A.town. That new summer I was back in the American West. My hiking partner and I were traipsing through the high country around Estes Park, Colorado when across the distance we saw a black spot cutting through the air between the peaks. Even at that great distance the speck soon took on the white/brown/white spectrum that let us know a Bald eagle was in our midst. To our astonishment the bird flew directly at us and without as much as a single beat of it's wings crossed directly over our heads. I fell on my back side and gasped in awe at the shear size and presence of the creature above me. It's curiosity satisfied, the eagle drifted off and was lost to my eye. I was lucky to see an eagle that day and I would not see another for thirty odd years.

My eagle sighting took place in the summer of 1973 the same year the Endangered Species Act was passed. A survey was completed the next year and only 791 breeding pairs of Bald eagles were found in the entire lower 48 states. From sea to shining sea so to speak. That was good news since just 10 years earlier in 1963 a remnant of only 487 nesting couples were counted from the estimated population of 100,000 pairs thought to have existed in 1782 when the Eagle won a fierce battle with the turkey to become the national symbol of the United States. A lot of blood was spilled in the 19th and 20th centuries both literally and figuratively as human beings began drinking deeply of our planet's treasures and both the turkey and Bald eagle would come close to landing in nature's scrap heap.
The concept of "Better Living Through Chemistry" came into it's hey-day during WWII when the miracle insecticide DDT was scrubbing the world clean of the yucky little creatures that inhabit the margins of our civilization. It seemed like a good idea at the time, after all, who hasn't wondered in a secret moment about the Lord's wisdom in creating the mosquito and we certainly wouldn't attempt to anthropomorphise the best of human nature using a malaria carrier as our totem. And so the domino's began to fall as the poison swept up the food chain until it threatened to finish off the revered Bald eagle once and forever. Fortunately we Americans required the charismatic raptors as a metaphor to describe our own grand illusions and could not stomach the obvious grim symbolism of its impending doom. We would not tolerate the shameful loss of our national icon even if it meant our potatoes, apples, chickens, and cows could no longer dance with us ecstatically on a bug free world stage. In 1972 DDT was banned in the U.S. Brilliant move.

When I first moved to the Pine River seven years ago and began to appreciate the marvelous variety of bird life around me I struck up a conversation with an older head who predicted that we would again have Bald eagles back in our area within five years. At the time it sounded like a hopeful bit of nonsense. I am elated to report that the old timer's premonition was right on the money. These days, 'round here, you'll see an eagle every day if you keep your head up. Bald Eagles were taken off the endangered species list in 2007 when nesting couples had reached a population of nearly 10,000. Whew, that was close!
There is even an official Bald eagle day here in the U.S. celebrated June 20th when we're asked to wear B.E. tee shirts and rejoice in our patriotic ideals. I made a motion we also wear mosquito tee shirts in a subtle effort to empathise the larger circle of life lessons learned from the recovery of our majestic eagles. That motion was squashed!

It is a great world, what's left of it. And I'm grateful to to the energetic and devoted people who did the heavy lifting back in the year 1940 to get the Bald Eagle Protection Act passed that made any human interference with the life cycle of the Bald and Golden Eagles illegal, like shooting them for target practice as an example.

Survival of the fittest is the way of this world, no question, I get that. Summing it up unpoetically; we live to eat only to be eaten. My Grand Hope for Homo-Sapiens is that we might someday see ourselves as a buffer to that Darwinian harshness and help to preserve our planets vastness instead of being so enthusiastic about consuming it. I would like it if we humans thought of ourselves as planet Earth's librarians, cataloging and preserving its wonders. I realise that for some "Librarian to the Planet" might sound like a demotion from our current lofty position as self-proclaimed Lords of the Universe.

Awe, that simple, vastly underrated emotion humans feel when confronted with a force or thing immensely greater than themselves, might be the natural worlds, and in that our own, best salvation. I felt awe the first time I saw waves break on the Pacific Ocean, caught sight of the snow capped Rockies, and observed the Northern Lights. Awe inspires respect and puts the order of things in their proper perspective. To experience awe changes a person. It is the emotion that can energises our best intentions, guide our principles, and help us to pay closer attention to the Big Picture. The feeling of awe gives us hard evidence that the world is not here for just "us guys," and that seeing a Bald eagle floating in the mountain air can and should always be a big deal!

Now it's time for World Bird Wednesday!

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

You are invited to link your blog with other bird photographers in a weekly celebration of these most diverse and intriguing of Earth's residents.

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

#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 compadres!

Come on it's your turn!

World Bird Wednesday XXXIV

2011-07-12T10:30:00.006-04:00

Gone Fishin'

Suzanne and I are off and away this week. I hope you will enjoying seeing a few of my favorite headers and a few others that didn't quite make the cut. See you next week with a heftier serving!

Now it's time for World Bird Wednesday!

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

You are invited to link your blog with other bird photographers in a weekly celebration of these most diverse and intriguing of Earth's residents.

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

#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 compadres!

Come on it's your turn!!

World Bird Wednesday XXXIII

2011-07-05T10:30:00.011-04:00

Now That's a Mouthful

It's Fish fly season in Michigan! This flying insect that breeds at the bottom of our coastal lakes and rivers, the very thing you see Lady Red Winged blackbird gorging on, is an Old Testament style pestilence that comes forth from the deep in numbers incalculable. They adorn every window, side walk and lamp post within five miles of the water with their slippery, squirming bodies. For fun you can stealthily place a fat one on your friends ear. The fish fly will wait patiently until your victim feels the slight yet annoying probing of the bugs rear antennas. You will get a good laugh when your loved one shakes their head frantically and slaps at their ear. It's a harmless practical joke as the little guys do not sting or bite, this being their only but important virtue.

The life of a fish fly is compressed into a single day. Hatch-sex-and fly until you die pretty much sums up it's frivolous existance. Common afterlife advice recommends heading for the white light if you should see such a thing on your way out. Presumably it leads to greener pastures. Apparently fish fly culture suggests a similar rule. As the sun sets on their big day the flies rapturously fly off in the direction of any bright light and swirl about until they drop dead in stinking piles by the millions. Whoops, wrong white light!

Here's a artsy fartsy picture that almost makes the fish fly pestilence look pleasant and looking at it dispassionately I suppose our local curse is an avian windfall.

I was hanging out in Detroit at the end of last week doing the firefighting thing. Ours is a 24 hour shift that ends at 7:30 AM. It was a good time for my son Joshua and I to take a drive over to Belle Isle, enjoy the sights from the middle of the river, and shake off our long night of putting the wet stuff on the red stuff. Soon after crossing the MacArthur bridge that spans the mainland to the island we spotted a Great Blue heron looking to spear breakfast at the North end of the pond facing Scott fountain, a magnificent white marble monument bequeathed to Detroit by it's most scurrilous playboy prankster at his death in 1910. After a frivolous life spent chasing wild women, gambling, ceaselessly suing his many adversaries, and playing vindictive practical jokes with money inherited from his father, James Scott had few friends among the living. His enemies were legion. As the hard drinking socialites health failed he conceived a brilliant plan to foil his stuffy detractors one last time. Played from beyond the grave, even as he made for the white light, Scott's lawyers laid down his final trump card.

With no relative to contest his last wishes James left the good people of Detroit with an interesting moral dilemma. Scott willed half a million dollars to the city specifically for the erection of a grand fountain on the crown jewel of Detroit's river front, Belle Isle, with this stipulation; that a heroic life size statue of himself also be commissioned and positioned there to watch over the fountain and further pester his still living adversaries. A towering Washington Monument style Doric column had been proposed for the same prime spot now coveted by James Scott by certain well heeled citizens but those efforts had failed to find traction financially. That the self serving Scott, lounging now in the Great Beyond, might out maneuver them caused a fury of contempt. The pulpits, politicians, and halls of commerce rang with a single voice,"This contemptible man, whose life valued no more than a fish fly for the common good that it achieved, should not be honored in this folly of cosmic self-promotion. Let the money rot like fish flies in July!"

Letting Them Gag On Their Indignation

15 years after his death Scott's cynical point was made. As the funds increased in value the temptation could not be resisted any longer and the fountain, with a contented looking bronze sculpture of James Scott looking on, was commissioned and built. The Cass Gilbert designed fountain is impossibly beautifully. The 510 foot circumference of the lower basin cradles dozens of fanciful characters carved from impeccable white marble spewing jets of water. At night, when the fish flies are out of season, it is illuminated magnificently and can render one speechless with wonder.

100 years after Mr. Scott's demise this improbable monument envisioned by the vile practical joker, whose last act was to expose the frailty of his fellow citizens righteous indignation when faced with a fat stack of dirty money, still says a mouthful.

Now it's time for World Bird Wednesday!

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

You are invited to link your blog with other bird photographers in a weekly celebration of these most diverse and intriguing of Earth's residents.

The thumbnails below are links to our contributors blogs. Click on them and view their beautiful posts.

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