World Bird Wednesday LXVII

Birds Ears

I was looking at today's header of the extremely well coiffured Mallard duck and it struck me, where are his ears? I suspect everyone but me already knew the answer to this. However; it didn't take me long to fill in this embarrassing knowledge gap, a birds ears are right where ours are, on the sides of their head. If you were to study portraiture, one rule you would quickly glean is that the correct North/South positioning of the human ear is the corner of the eye to the tip of the nose. Look real hard at the mallard photo and you will detect a small darkened swatch of feathers about the size of his eye at that intersection. I'm thinking the ear canal rests behind those protective feathers. I am now looking for birds ears everywhere, going over old photos trying to detect some slight deviation in the head feathers that give away its location. I have become a bird ear zealot, managing to bend every conversation toward this end: Have you ever wondered where a birds ears are? I am spreading this important information one soul at a time and I expect nearly everyone in Michigan will know the correct answer before the Mayan calender brings our world to an abrupt conclusion later this year. Sadly, some folk seem disappointed with the truth, as if they hoped birds had ears by their knees like crickets do. Don't shoot the messenger I say, it wasn't my call!

An immature Red-tailed hawk I'm guessing.

   Suddenly, a second important question entered my mind. Who, rationally speaking, has the best looking head; fishes, birds, or mammals? I would include insects, those strange invertebrates in this equation, except the unfair advantage of having over 1.2 million species more than our vertebrate families 62,000 (only 5,400 of which are mammals) makes pondering the question awkward. Besides, even I would humbly purpose that my own flesh covered coconut looks better than your average ant head. So, for purposes of discussion lets eliminate the spineless.
   Clearly, one disadvantage we mammals have when comparing our noggins with birds and fishes are those conspicuous ear flaps screwing up the headscape, about as attractive as dried apricots. If your a fan of clean, aerodynamic lines it is a deal breaker. Many times I have seen humans try to hide their ears by sweeping their hair back over them as if an Irish setter were sitting on their head with those furry hind legs pressed to each side. Even earring displays as flashy as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon don't hide the essential truth.

   Many a failed artist has turned to meat cutting as a viable trade because of the difficulty of drawing a respectable ear. Even the incomparable Van Gogh sliced off his own ear to make self portraiture easier, that's my theory. Add an unfortunately formed nose to the mess and you've got real trouble. Sure, cute little tiger faces up the average for team mammal but there's not quite enough of them to make a difference. Bronze medal.
   Okay, so it's between fish and birds for the championship. Who has the best looking head between these two? Easy. Sorry fish, but having external lungs flapping unceasingly on the sides of the head where your ears should be is hardly winsome. Silver.
   So in the end the birds have it, like there was any doubt. Gold medal!

How chillingly close is this swan image to Van Gogh's self portrait? 

    I want to say how appreciative I am to have received such high regards and genuine, heartfelt advice responding to my post last week announcing my retirement from the Detroit Fire Department. My last day is this coming Friday. Those are heavy words for me to carry. My son Josh and I will be riding Engine 23 together that last day on the job. What a rare pride I take away having such a fine young man call me Dad. We have chalked up many long nights together only to meet the next morning, smelling of smoke, for our ritual, a peaceful drive around Belle Isle clicking bird pictures. How I shall miss those blessed conversations!

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!

#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 LXVI

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Come on it's your turn!

World BIrd Wednesday LXIV

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Come on it's your turn!