World Bird Wednesday LXXV

A Farewell to the Fire Scene

    Lets begin at the end. It was my last day at the firehouse. This is a day every firefighter experiences; it is the lucky fireman who walks out knowing it's his last.
    That's me, lucky.
    I reluctantly left the Detroit Fire Department at 59 years of age, twelve months earlier than the mandatory retirement age of Sixty. The last five years I had been the Senior Fire Engine Operator of Engine 23. Through those years I have seen a remarkable group of professional firefighters push back against the firestorm that relentlessly consumes the City of Detroit one building at a time. With a destitute, barely functioning Government backing them up, front line smoke eaters, the folk whose job description is "first one through the door", have been walking point for over twenty years straight. Indeed, the average age of a Detroit firefighter at this writing is 45 And that's an old 45. Struggling smoke blind through a tangled jumble of "god knows what," tugging a stiffly charged attack line to the seat of the fire, is designed for fresh and hardy twenty year old men and women. The Motor City firefighters of today have never been off the pipe in all their long years and like nowhere else on the planet, in Detroit, you are guaranteed a fire every working day of your career.
    There is no safety net, it is not work for sane people, yet these hard scrabble public servants are capable of astonishing feats.
     It is a privilege anyone associated with the fire service would relish; to be a fly on the wall when the inner circle of this century old firehouse gets down to relighting their old box alarms. Everything that cannot be learned in the curriculum of a good fire science degree is shared first hand. Like how it feels when your ears start to melt off. Here the old saying applies: If you wanna know, you gotta go.
     I feel like I speak as an outsider already. The newly departed have a sense of urgency and clarity to their reminisces by virtue of their new perspective floating as they do just above the fray.
     I want to say thank you to everyone who has helped me get to this day of retirement but my ghostly fingers pass right through what used to be brick and steel and I can not find a way.

   The Yellow Rumped Warbler is the first of this jumpy species to return to Michigan in the spring. I chased a pair around a heavily wooded corner of my riverside lot yesterday but the sun was high and bright, complicating the many good looks I had with dark underbellies and twiggy shadows. They dodged around from branch to branch happily gobbling up insects and paying me no mind. The Northern Flicker in the header, on the other hand, visited for only a few seconds while I concentrated on the Yellow Rumps all afternoon and wouldn't you know it, the Flicker snaps were the catch of the day.
   Also on a happy note I found a pair of Tufted Titmice nesting in an old woodpecker hole with great afternoon sun. I think maybe the wildlife is getting used to my being around more. The chipmunks practically ignore me!

I am happy to acknowledge China, New Caledonia, Antiqua, Barbuda, and Montenegro as first time countries to visit World Bird Wednesday this month.

                                                                                           Cheers,

                                                                                                        Dave

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

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

#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 LXXIV

Jumping To Conclusions

It hasn't been a great half-century for woodpeckers in North America, in all likelihood two woodpecker species on this continent; the Ivory billed of Cuba and the American South, and the largest woodpecker in the world, the Imperial of the old growth forests of the Sierra Madre Mountain Range in  Eastern Mexico, have had their extinction moments. Pause for thought.
   But are they extinct with a capital E? Is there still hope? Are these confounded Ivory-billed woodpecker sightings true?
   Who the heck knows...
   Still, you can't help but get that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach now that the Ivory-billed is being called the Elvis bird. When a hopeful sighting of the missing woodpecker comes in from the Arkansas "Big Woods" it never arrives with a picture. Usually the lucky person who spots the world's rarest bird somehow fails to drop their binoculars and pick up their camera in time. There's more evidence of Sasquatch.
   Cornell University has verified a 2005 video, the Luneau tape, as having an Ivory-billed woodpecker in it. This is the only visible proof that these birds survived into the new millennium. Cornell has justly earned its considerable reputation and their analysis of this vaunted video rivals anything done to the much clearer film of the Kennedy Assassination. On the reliability of their findings valuable resources were rushed to aid what may have been the last Ivory billed woodpeckers then on the planet. It hasn't gone so well since.

    In a world where good news is acutely needed, the undoing of an apparent extinction deserves our time, money, and resources. There are none but the worse cynics that hopes the Imperial and Ivory-bill are gone, but without a conclusive picture, support for the expensive search process has begun to fray around the edges.
    Even Cornell's desperate $50,000 reward for a verified sighting remains unclaimed after years. Why not make it a $5,000,000 reward? Wouldn't it be worth it to possibly save a species?  I wonder if Cornell U would pay on a Cuban Ivory-bill Woodpecker if any there survive?
   Undernourished hopes are all we have that our collective conscience can avoid the stigma of having been on watch when these birds ended their existence. The deathwatch is agonizing.
   Scientist postulate it would take a minimum twenty or so Ivory billed woodpeckers to repopulate the now regenerating forest.
   If they are still hanging on: God help them and forgive us.

A short video describing the high tech search techniques.

    I was sitting on the couch, the window open, with camera in hand shooting front yard feeder shots when a male Pileated woodpecker landed in the maple tree. My eyes got as big as flying saucers. The prosperous Pileateds are less fussy about their old growth forest requirements than their unfortunate cousins, the Ivory-bills and Imperials were. This handsome bird came back around over the next day thrilling Suzanne and I with great looks and photographic opportunities.We never saw the female. Believe me, my camera was never far from my hand all weekend long.
    Here's hoping someone in the Old South collects that 50 G's for a similar capture of an Ivory-billed very soon!

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 LXXIII

The Lesser of Two Equals

One of the most difficult birds for me to photograph are the jet black species such as crows, ravens, and Red-winged blackbirds. In these early days of spring, the American robins and RWblackbirds are about all you see, true harbingers of the season. How do you balance the over saturated  red and yellow shoulder patches with the light killing depths of the black body? One answer is to wait for the perfect cloudy day or...ignore those dramatic dynamics and concentrate on the subtle colors of the gentler members of the harem when they pop out of the reed beds and show themselves. I could pretend to express a  personal preference for these well camouflaged, sparrow colored ladies, but the truth is the guys are generally a little to tough to handle. My virtual waste basket is stuffed with near misses. The perfectly exposed, dramatically posed, male Red-winged black bird photo remains a rare treasure and a worthy quest.

One of these days I will see the Yellow-headed blackbird that lives in small colonies here in the Saginaw Bay area of Michigan. I imagine the difficulties in managing a good picture will be equally frustrating  and therefore just as desirable.

I visited Crow island on a bright Easter Sunday and found an active pond behind a concrete fabricating facility. How come these hot spots seem to be juxtaposed to the most unlikely neighbors? Tree swallows spun through the air in abundance!

Even the Blue herons didn't seem to mind the cement dust. The fishing must have been great.

And so it went this week...

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 LXXII

Nesting

God gives every bird his worm, but He does not throw it into the nest.

                                                           P. D. James

   And He doesn't build the nest either!
   I think one of the very fine things human beings do is to set up bird houses and feeders. The payoff is that we get to closely observe our feathered friends as they eat and raise their young. Not all birds care for our charity and remain fiercely independent, but others, like Bluebirds, actually need our attention when it comes to housing. The invading armies of aggressive European starlings and English sparrows out compete bluebirds for the naturally occurring cavities and holes that the pretty blue species depends upon. Between 1920 and 1970 there was a sharp decline in the population of Bluebirds, and this icon of happiness, once as common as the American robin is today, began to fade from the scene. Like death from a thousand tiny cuts, it seemed everything conspired to diminish the Bluebird's light. The near eradication of beaver, and in turn the elimination of their left over stumps, had the unintended consequence of limiting nesting opportunities. Even the change over from wooden to metal fence posts on farm boundries took it's toll.
    That humans have a conscience; an inner voice that prods us toward an enlightened end, is an essential mystery. All the great thinkers, both religious and secular have struggeled to explain it's origin. The Bluebirds fate hung on this instinct to do good.
   So it was the human community led by Dr. Larry Zeleny,  intentionally began to build millions of bird houses specifically to save the Bluebirds, and it has helped, populations have rebounded at the estimated rate of 5% a year since the alarm was sounded in 1978.
   I have never been so proud to be human.

His soft warble melts the ear, as the snow is melting in the valleys around.

The bluebird comes and with his warbles drills the ice and sets from the rivers and ponds and frozen ground.
                                                                 Henry D. Thoreau, March 2, 1859

   The young Snow owls of the 2012 eruption continue to fight for survival. Here is the second of this group I have seen. I spotted this beauty deep in Nayanquing Point Wildlife Reserve, what fantastic luck!
    Is the idea of a Wildlife Reserve an oxymoron?

Fast

Beautiful

  

    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!