World Bird Wednesday LIV

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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? 

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

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

  

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

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

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

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...

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

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

  

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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!

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.

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

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

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