Surprise!

Sometimes I don’t know what I’ve photographed until well after I’ve done it. I always try to get my shot composition just right. But with wildlife, I often only have time to see it, hit my shutter, and hope for the best. Such was the case here.

This is a male Western tanager, with part of its dinner. We were staying at a hotel about 45 minutes outside Grand Tetons National Park for a few days this past summer; it was the only affordable spot we could find in the area. We had just spent a wonderful day hiking through the park with the best guide possible: my high school friend Lokey, who has lived in Jackson, Wyoming for many years. The park is practically her backyard and that’s how well she knows it.

I didn’t see any interesting birds on our hike, but once back at the hotel, I saw a flash of yellow flying through a tree. I went chasing it. When it would land on a branch, I’d start firing my shutter. My Sony alpha camera has a setting that allows the camera to keep taking pictures as long as I keep pressing the shutter release button. You could say it turns the camera from a single-shot rifle into a machine gun.

The tanager was moving so much, I didn’t know if I had captured anything usable. I remember my wife asking me when I got back to the room, “Did you get the picture you wanted?” And I remember telling her, “I don’t think so.”

But once I was able to look at the pictures on my computer, I found this! Not only did I get a clear picture of the tanager, but a clear picture of a tanager with what looks like a bee in its beak. Insects are the part of the tanagers’ diet that may be responsible for their scarlet head feathers. Most birds with red feathers owe their redness to a variety of plant pigments known as carotenoids. But the Western tanager is not most birds. It gets its redness from a rare pigment called rhodoxanthin. They can’t make this substance in their own bodies; so scientists think they get it from the insects in their diet.

Western tanagers are plentiful through Western woodlands. I saw them in Glacier National Park and I’ve seen them in Santa Fe. If you don’t live out West, I hope you get a chance to visit. Our National Parks offer more wonders than I can describe. It’d be a shame if you didn’t take the chance to enjoy what visionary public servants from a century and more ago took care to preserve and protect, just for future generations.

A fitting name

Some birds are named for their colors, like the cardinal and the bluebird. Some are named for how someone thought their call sounded, like the towhee and chickadee. Some birds are named for where they were first spotted, like the Cape May and magnolia warblers. And then there’s this bird.

If you had been the first to see this bird, you might have called it a stilt, too. This is the black-necked stilt, one of five species of stilts, and a common one all along the Gulf Coast. Only flamingos have longer legs in proportion to the rest of their bodies.

They wade in shallow waters to capture their meals of aquatic invertebrates and fish. Favorites on their menu include crawfish, brine flies, brine shrimp, beetles, water boatmen, and tadpoles. They peck, snatch, and plunge their heads into the water in pursuit of their food, and will herd fish into shallow waters to trap them there.

Black-necked Stilts nest on the ground. They tend to build on surfaces above water, such as small islands, clumps of vegetation, or even, occasionally, floating mats of algae. And there they lay one clutch each spring of up to five eggs.

I took this picture last winter in Florida’s Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. The annual birding festival there is next week, January 23-28. It’s a wonderful way to see all of Florida’s prettiest wading birds.

Snow Day

I post this picture in spiritual solidarity with all my friends in the Midwest and into the mid-Atlantic states who are dealing with the four letter word I find most offensive: snow. St. Louis, my home for more than 16 years, is getting about a foot this weekend.

A foot of snow will have far less impact on St. Louis than two inches has on Atlanta. Trust me; I’ve experienced both. In 2011, we got six inches of snow on MLK Day weekend. Temperatures stayed below freezing for almost a week, so the snow didn’t melt. The city was shut down for the whole week. A few years later, a midday snow storm caused such massive traffic jams that some of my friends didn’t get home from work until the next morning.

I took this photo a few years ago, shooting right out of an upstairs bedroom window into the dogwood tree next to our house.

Bluebirds live here year ‘round. And when it gets cold, they puff themselves up, using the air between their feathers as insulation. As snow here is pretty uncommon—we can go a two or three years without getting any, and rarely get more than a few snowfalls in a winter--it doesn’t seem to interrupt their food supply. So they come through it okay.

That is my wish for everyone being snow on this weekend.

Pecking away

Yesterday I wrote about a cavity a family had flickers had carved out in a tree next to my house. The picture above is a different tree and a different flicker, but the same general idea.

We were in Boulder visiting our son David a few years ago. We were walking through a nature preserve on the outskirts of town when we came upon this bird, very diligently cutting this tree trunk down to size. Flickers nest in tree cavities; both the male and female work at creating their home space, and both help incubate the eggs of their chicks. Very progressive.

You’ll find flickers throughout the US. You’ll see a flash of color in their wings when the fly off. In the East, that flash is yellow; in the West, it’s red. The yellow flash is why the bird is sometimes known as a “yellowhammer.” It’s the state bird of Alabama, which is why one of its nicknames is the Yellowhammer State.

Flickers are part of the woodpecker family, but they feed mostly on the ground. Ants are its main food, and the flicker digs in the dirt to find them. It uses its long barbed tongue to lap up the ants.

Flickers are gorgeous. I remember reading a story about famed naturalist and artist Roger Tory Peterson, in which he said his love for birds sprang from seeing a flicker as a child. I get that!

Waiting for an owl

There is a red maple tree next to my house. After it was damaged in the tornado that came near the house in 1998, a family of flickers carved out cavity in the tree to build their nest. Their babies came and went, as babies do. The cavity has gone unused since. But almost every day, I go to the window and look, hoping that one day I’ll see some owls making a home there.

If and when that happens, it may look a lot like this. This is a screech owl, sleeping in a tree in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park. My friend Karen McGinnis, an excellent photographer with an impressive portfolio of many owl species, had found this guy and posted a picture of him (or her). When I asked where it was, she most kindly told me exactly where I could find him (or her).

It was Christmas Day, 2016. In keeping with our tradition, my wife and I had gone to the movies. “Hidden Figures” opened that day, playing in only one theater in Atlanta. We went to the noon matinee—the first screening of the movie in the city, and loved the film. Afterwards, we drove over to Piedmont Park and went to the spot Karen had described. It was about 3:00 p.m., a time when all good owls should be fast asleep (we’ll make an exception for burrowing owls, which work a day shift). And there he or she was.

Ornithologists will tell you that this is the red morph of the screech owl. They also come in gray. Whatever color, I really hope I look out my window one day and see one sleeping in that nice cavity in my red maple tree.

As I was saying...

I wrote yesterday—and had written once before that—about the amazing number of different birds species living in the relatively tiny area that is Costa Rica. And whenever you visit another country with a different climate and geography than your own, you’re bound to see birds that make you wonder, “What is THAT?”

Exhibit A: the red-legged honeycreeper. I can see how it got the first part of its name. But honeycreeper? They feed on fruit, insects, and even nectar in a variety of forest habitats. The honeycreeper's thin, downward-curving bill is an adaptation to nectar-eating, but also allows the it to get at fruit and insects.  Honeycreepers are able to reach into the narrow cracks of ripening fruit husks to nip bits off the rich parts inside, long before birds with shorter, heavier bills can reach them.  In the same way, the bill fits neatly into cracks in tree bark and behind twisting vines to pluck out insects too small and hidden for other birds to find.  And as these tiny insects make up the majority of the red-legged honeycreeper's diet, maybe it should be named the red-legged bug muncher. Or maybe not.

This bird is very common in Central and northern South America from Mexico south to Brazil.  I saw this one on our first stop in Costa Rica, near the Arenal volcano. We were having breakfast one morning on the restaurant’s patio , when one of the staff came outside with a bucket of cut-up fruit. He stuck pieces on this multi-pronged piece of wood, resembling a tree branch. Within minutes, all sorts of colorful birds descended for their own breakfast al fresco.

Seeing this bird sent us scrambling for our cameras, and then for the field guide. If you visit Central America or another continent, you’ve GOT to have a field guide if you want to know what you’re seeing. I hope you get to visit Costa Rica. And I hope you see the red-legged honeycreeper.

What is THAT?

The American Birding Association lists more than 900 bird species as living or visiting the US and Canada. And I confess, I don’t know them all. When I saw this guy last spring, I had to ask, “What is THAT?”

The answer is a black-throated blue warbler. It’s one of the roughly 40 warbler species that live in the US and Canada. The Black-throated blue spends the spring and summer in Eastern hardwood forests from Georgia north to Canada, then quite sensibly winters in the Caribbean.

I saw this bird in the Magree Marsh, about 50 miles east of Toledo. It’s a major stopover for songbirds migrating north during the spring. Thousands of birders come there in May to see and photograph birds that are otherwise very difficult or impossible to find. If I go back, maybe I’ll be lucky enough to see this bird’s cousins, the black-throated green and black-throated gray warblers.

If you think the more than 900 different bird species of the US and Canada is impressive, consider this: Costa Rica, which is roughly the same size as West Virginia, had 850 different bird species!

An Underground Sensation

Birds live in and among the trees, or in the water, right? Not this one. You’re face-to-face with a burrowing owl. They will dig their own burrows or take over one abandoned by a prairie dog, ground squirrel or tortoise. They also hunt on the ground during the day, which explains why this one was staring straight at me when we met one afternoon a few years ago.

We were in Naples visiting our friends Debbie and Eugene, and heard from another birder we met on a walk about a nest of burrowing owls on nearby Marco Island. We went to the spot he described—a vacant lot in residential area—and there he or she was.

You can find burrowing owls all over the Florida peninsula, and throughout the Western U.S.. They’re habitats are declining rapidly because we keep building on the lands they use. But they’re pretty clever and adaptable: they’ve been known to nest in piles of PVC pipe and other lairs unintentionally provided by humans. Conservationists make use of the owls' adaptability by supplying artificial burrows made of buckets, pipes, tubing, and other human-made materials.

Here’s looking at you, kid.