Showing posts with label warblers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label warblers. Show all posts

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Something awesome this way comes!

Spring migration.



Those words make me giddy. 
(Photo by Charley Eiseman)


Next week, I'm attending the Biggest Week in American Birding.  It's been too long since I got to experience the absolute wonder of Lake Erie's marshes and shore in May. 

I'll be blogging live from the festival,  (I'm an "Official Blogger", woohoo!) so stay tuned to this blog for all the news!

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

All it takes

After a crappy morning, I needed to un-blue myself. I just needed a bird. A "good" bird.
Now, they are all "good" (except for house sparrows and starlings, but I digress), but I just needed a brilliant flash of something I don't see every day.

Lake Isabella is my haven. I have "MY" corner, near the river. This little space tucked away from the fishermen and joggers attracts all the warblers this time of year, with the juicy caterpillars hanging from the sycamores and the relative quiet.
And red-tailed hawks, and gnat catchers, and waxwings, and the resident Great Horned Owl family.

Hearing a "zweet-zweet-zweet" overhead had me reaching for the iPod. Not a black and white warbler, but a similar cadence. (Those of you who were at New River can hear a B&W from miles away now, I think.) The "Squeaky Tricycle Wheel" sound. But this song was too loud, too slow.
A zip of blinding yellow helped me find the song on the good ol' BirdJam.
(Hi, Jay!!!)

Prothonotary warbler. A surreal yellow, with black button eyes that seem too big for its face.
I dialed up the song and played it. I got an immediate response, and was rewarded by the bird landing FIVE FEET above my HEAD. Luckily I had my camera in the other hand, and I got this photo:
Prothonotary warbler Lake Isabella

And it didn't just flit away into the trees as I expected. It sat there and observed me. It was a moment just for the bird and myself.

I let it watch me until it had its fill and popped away. I turned off the iPod (see here for ethical use of BirdJam software) and let the bird have the field.

That's all it takes.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Confusing fall warblers, I SMITE thee!

If you watch birds for any length of time, you are bound to run up against a bird you can't identify.
Fall warblers routinely fall into this category. In breeding plumage, warblers are easy if you have a field guide (and if you can get a good look at the bird, that is).

I hate ID'ing warblers. I love looking at them, but figuring out what the Hell I'm looking at gives me a headache. Kind of how I used to feel about ID'ing hawks. Hmmm.

Today, when confronted with a CFW (Confusing Fall Warbler), I bucked up and decided to figure it out. It took an hour to ID ONE BIRD.

This flitty goofball would only hold still for maybe three seconds at a time. I cursed my binoculars. I cursed the beautiful sunlight that inevitably back lit the bird. I cursed the park workers who just had to drive through when the bird got close enough to get pictures.

I ran through my field guide (Thank you, Sibley, for showing fall plumages!), observed the behavior, ruled out most of the warblers.
Two white wing bars.
Yellow belly.
Dark eye line.
Gleaning from the undersides of leaves.

Hold still, DAMMIT~
front bay breasted CFW

bay breasted CFW
For the first time, I was able to see a reddish blush on the flanks. Thank you, flitty bird, for showing me that.

CFW bay breasted
So, yes. After an hour, I ID'ed this as a Bay-breasted Warbler. It helped that it's early fall and this little guy still had some "bay" on the "breast".

If you want to see better photos than what I have, go look here.

And if you want to dispute me and tell me that there is no way that is a Bay-breasted Warbler, be prepared to make me cry and possibly call you vile names.

Monday, May 12, 2008

Bird stories

The Beautiful Boardwalk


Here's my list of birds seen and/or heard this weekend (Thanks to Kathi, this list is way longer than it would have been if I had been alone):
Bold = LIFER
(there are only seven lifers...I must have miscounted. But still....)
***
Canada goose
Tundra swan (yes, I saw a live one)
Wood duck (In a TREE, no less)
Mallard
Northern shoveler

Double-crested cormorant
Great blue heron (100's)
Great egret (100's)

Turkey vulture
Bald eagle
Red-shouldered hawk
Red-tailed hawk
GOLDEN EAGLE (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
American kestrel
Peregrine falcon

American coot

SEMIPALMATED PLOVER
Killdeer
Greater yellowlegs
Lesser yellowlegs
Spotted sandpiper
Ruddy turnstone
Dunlin (500 +)

Ring-billed gull
Herring gull
COMMON TERN

Mourning dove

Northern flicker

Eastern phoebe

Purple martin
Tree swallow
Barn swallow

Black-capped chickadee
HOUSE WREN
Golden-crowned kinglet
Blue-gray gnatcatcher
Veery
SWAINSON'S THRUSH
Wood thrush
American robin
Gray catbird
Brown thrasher
European starling

WARBLERS:
NASHVILLE
Yellow
Chestnut-sided
Magnolia
Cape May
Black-throated blue
Yellow-rumped (Hey, Delia! I saw yellow-rumped warblers!!! Hee hee)
Palm
American redstart
Prothonotary
Ovenbird
Northern waterthrush
Yellow-breasted chat

SUMMER TANAGER

White-throated sparrow
White-crowned sparrow

Northern cardinal
Rose-breasted grosbeak
Indigo bunting

Red-winged blackbird (there were at least two RWBB's every five feet. And that's not an exaggeration)
Common grackle
Baltimore oriole

American goldfinch

House sparrow (very very sparse, thank goodness)

And now, some pictures:

No ID yet
I don't have an ID for this one yet. Anyone want to throw in? It's either some sort of empidonax or a female warbler of some kind.
UPDATE: Kathi can't comment (Blogger's acting like Frogger) but she agrees that this is some sort of empidonax)

Another dead Tundra swan
Yep, another dead tundra swan. I Chimped, but the body was too torn up to figure anything out. I looked for bands, but this one is anonymous.

Tundra swan looks bloody
This one was alive, but looked bloody! I watched, and it seemed to preen most of this stuff off. I assume that it just had its head stuck in some mud underwater, and not injured in some way. I observed it for quite a few minutes, and it seemed just fine. Scared me, though.

Crazy Ovenbird
Ovenbirds are just color-crazy. This one was stylin' with that brown-bordered orange head.


Let this be a Gray cheeked thrush!
I would very much like this to be a gray-cheeked thrush. It's not outside the realm of possibility, since Kathi saw one the day before. Anyone?
UPDATE: A Swainson's. Crap.

Grackle has a bad day
Poor grackle. He got into a tussle with someone.

Muskrat and yellowlegs love
A muskrat and a lesser yellowlegs....an odd couple.
Feel free to sing "Muskrat Love" by Captain and Tennille. I'll wait.

Story:
It was getting late in the day, and I knew that I had to start for home soon.
I walked the lake trail that Kathi had pointed out to me earlier, and I am glad I did.

First, I saw the terns that we had glimpsed the day before, but couldn't ID.
Common terns, soaring and plunging into the very cold water for fish. They didn't even care that I was standing just beyond the water, snapping photos and giggling like a maniac.

Common Tern
They reminded me of the black skimmers the Flock saw at Cape May.
Gorgeous, elegant, graceful birds.

I was preparing myself mentally for the actual removal of body and soul from MY Lake Erie ( I never want to come home after being there), when I noticed that the terns had disappeared before my eyes.
A medium-sized bird was flying parallel to the beach with strong, purposeful wing beats. Hmm. That looks like some kind of dark gull. No, wait. That looks falcon-ish.

A peregrine falcon. Just for me.

Peregrine flying away
(This is the best I could do. My eyes were all teary and I was jumping up and down and struggling with my new birding bra and trying to get the camera up to my face)

Peregrines hold a sacred place in my heart. Lucy was the first one I ever laid eyes on, and her mixture of sweetness and nervousness, and yet that unabashed fierceness, has endeared the species to my soul forever.
So I stood there on a lonely beach on Lake Erie, buffeted by cold wind and freshwater spray, and cried because a peregrine falcon had just passed by. Yeah, I'm all crunchy on the outside, but there's a chewy, gooey center in there somewhere.

Tomorrow: The eagle that didn't get away!

Friday, September 21, 2007

Birding with KatDoc is really the Pits (or, If you are birding with OLDER people, remember to bring an ear trumpet)

*I have had a day for the books, y'all. First, I tried to capture the "cute" little orange kitten, and was rewarded by 14 puncture wounds in my right arm. After wrapping it in gauze, Lorelei went out to Stonelick Lake to wade in the water, feel the sand between our toes, and maybe see some birds. We were there 2 minutes, and my CAMERA broke. (The lens won't retract) So, instead of going through the horror of maybe seeing some great birds and NOT being able to take any pictures, we left and went to Best Buy, where I said goodbye to my camera for 2 to 3 WEEKS. (Tip: If you spend more than $200 on anything, GET the WARRANTY)
I am forced to use my very old, very slow camera that has a whole 2.8 X zoom, and 3 whopping megapixels.*


Word to the wise:
If you ever get to go birding with KatDoc, be prepared to see NO BIRDS WHATSOEVER. I have birded with her before, and really have yet to see anything interesting.
Of course, it might not be that there aren't any birds to be found, but instead that we spend so much time laughing hysterically, we are missing them all.
I bet Kathi will beat me to the post, since this camera was made by cavemen. And since I no longer have the software for this camera, I had to up load the pics through Picasa, and then I couldn't find where they had gone to.


We went to That Place. The one that is illegal unless you have a permit. Or, in Kathi's case, you know someone "on the inside".

The trip list, as far as I can remember:
Pied-billed grebes
4 Cardinals
4+ Carolina chickadees
2 Wood ducks
7 billion mallards
2 Least sandpipers
7 billion killdeer (or maybe it was just one, and it was following us)
Some American coots
1 million mourning doves (or MO-DO's, as Kathi calls them)
Black ducks, we think
A flock of Canada geese
Some kind of hawk, a tiny speck on the horizon
Gray catbirds
A whitetail deer (I saw this one, but Kathi missed it because she was too busy looking through her binoculars at a stick)
Rabbits
Frogs
A snake
Turtle heads (presumably attached to turtle bodies, but we weren't sure)

P9210025
I was actually one up on Kathi here, because I had driven in to the place before, albeit illegally.
Isn't it pretty?
P9210040
We found a really dead goose.
Since we haven't had any rain, the body was in very good shape (the naturalist said it had been there for a long time). So we pulled a "Julie" and poked and prodded it, puzzling out what might have happened to it. And took 127 pictures of it.
Chimpin'!! Eee! Eee! Eee!
P9210032
This was our best moment of the evening...a fall warbler. After a lot of field guide digging, we are calling it a Prairie warbler. And Kathi saw a Nashville, but I missed it. I must have been straining to ID a clump of mud on the far shore.
P9210046
The water is more than four feet below what it was this time last year. Makes for fun rock formations. (The white dot is the reflection of the moon)
P9210043
God help me, but as I was trying to take a picture of the moon and its reflection, pulling another "Julie" by getting into a really strange pose, Kathi took a picture of me. Can't wait to see that one!
*Just checked Kathi's blog, and she must have gone to bed or something, so check out her version of our excursion tomorrow!
Edit: The Zick has chimed in, and the warbler is a Cape May, not a Prairie. Damn. Woulda been a lifer.

Monday, September 17, 2007

I did it the legal way, but the legal way sucks.

I had a million things to do today, one right after the other, but I managed to squeeze in 45 minutes of birding at "Grand Valley". If you want to read about my previous trips, click here and here and here....the last one was with Kathi (KatDoc) when she showed me the "legal" way to bird at the pits. And just as Kathi commented on my last post, I too am getting birding fever now that the crappy, hot summer weather has passed. And Fall Migration is revving up! Whoot!
The legal way to bird at the pits is also frustratingly far away. Way up on a hill overlooking the water.

grebe
Pied-billed grebe

cedar waxwing
There were between 50 and 75 cedar waxwings working the trees. And I could only get two semi-decent pictures.

preening waxwings
So, you won't turn around so I can get a good picture of your face?
Fine. I am totally taking a picture of your butt.

And the nemesis of all birders...the FALL WARBLER:
fall warbler
Let's see. We have yellowish head and chest, white wing bars, and faint streaking on the chest. I am trying to turn this into a pine warbler. Anyone want to chime in?
fall warbler 2
I'm going back with Lorelei tomorrow, when I will have more time. Thanks for showing me the "won't go to jail" way to bird the pits!