Category Archives: Birds

Birds, In the neighborhood, Snapshots, Whatever

Branching out

13 Comments

Late April in NJ is when one might expect young GH Owls to begin exploring outside the confines of their nests. They’re not yet able to fly, but are too big to sit still in their nests so begin to *branch* in nearby trees and test their wings until their flight feathers come in. This one was found tonight on someone’s deck and the smart people who found it called the police. (Wouldn’t have been my first call, but whatever!)

The DH picked it up (and got footed for his trouble), took it off to a local vet to be sure it was okay, stopped home to pick up the photographer (me!) and it was back in this birch close to its nest tree within an hour or so.

Have a look at those feet!

Birds, In the neighborhood, Snapshots, Whatever

Useless bird photography tips

9 Comments

Tip #1: If you find yourself lacking in either good equipment, skill or interesting and flamboyant birds to photograph, it always helps to take pics of birds in places one isn’t used to seeing them. This will make up for your lack of skill, somewhat. Maybe. Probably not.

Example #1: Robins belong on grassy lawns or in muddy nests, not sandy beaches. The odd habitat distracts the viewer from the less than stellar exposure and the soft focus from your long lens that is sooo darn slow.

Example #2: Eastern towhees should be skulking on the ground in leaf-strewn forests or scratching around beneath blooming beach plum bushes or in poison ivy tangles. They are almost never seen perched in trees. This from-below view is interesting for its novelty and may keep the viewer from noticing the poor composition and soft focus of your photo.

Coming soon: Tips for taking pics of any bird that sits still long enough!

Birds, Dog days, In the neighborhood, Seasons

Bayside

9 Comments

Today was the type of Spring day I wait for… perfectly warm, a Friday, payday… and a chance to sneak off work early and hit the beach for a couple hours…


Because it’s nesting season for beach birds, Luka could only run on the bay side of Sandy Hook, but run he did! He swam some, too, and came across a couple mating horseshoe crabs floating in the flooded marsh. I guess this is the first full moon of the spring and the tide was very high, and well, the horseshoe crabs were doing their thing. Nice to see. I don’t know what it is about dogs and horseshoe crabs, but Luka barked and growled and was afraid like every other dog I’ve ever had.


He was in his element there, in the marsh, tasting the prickly pear cactus and chewing sticks after I tossed them into the water for him. He really wants to be a bird dog, I think, and he certainly looks the part, finally, when he’s in the water.


I had to hold him by the collar for a pic of us two… he was sopping wet at this point and had just run off with two complete strangers… such a friendly dog; I think he’d wander along with anyone so long as it looked like they were about to do something fun.


Speaking of fun… a girl after my own heart… searching a tidal pool for hermit crabs. Look at those wellies! She was careful to warn me not to be fooled by snails.


One of my favorite sunset views… the osprey platform in the far distance is occupied, as is usual, but the residents went off fishing soon after I arrived. Some brant are still around, but the calls of oystercatchers have replaced those of oldsquaw echoing across the bay. I found towhees in the holly forest, but no willets overhead, yet. It’s not properly Spring without the call of the willet.

Birds, Whatever

First looks

6 Comments

Patrick invited us to share a bit about the first pair of binoculars that we used for birding. Unlike Patrick, I came to birding kinda late in life, when I was in my mid-twenties, and bought a pair of Kowa’s at the nature center where I would end up volunteering a few weeks later.

They were cheap and pretty awful, but nothing as bad as what I see some people trying to learn birds with. I used them for a couple years until I was able to appreciate the difference between a $100 pair of binoculars and a $1000 pair of binoculars. I saved up for the Zeiss 7X42’s I use now and still keep those old Kowa’s on the counter to grab when I see something interesting out the kitchen window. They’re always dusty, but I still see nice birds with them once in a while.

Now I’m trying to remember what my first bird was with the new Zeiss’… I think it may have been a prothonotary on the first day of the spring weekend in Cape May in 98 or 99.

Birds, In the neighborhood

Meet the new neighbors

8 Comments

I’m using the word ‘neighbor’ very broadly, of course, but these two eaglets set a state record, so I’m allowed to be proud! Their nest is very easily viewed and is conveniently located at one of the nicest county parks in my area.

This nest is one of 3 or 4 in my county; another is within a mile or two of home, but the exact location of that nest is a well-guarded secret. I don’t have bald eagle on my yard list, yet, but someday soon I’m sure I will.

Photo from the Asbury Park Press. Full story available here.

Birds, PSA

Spring pitch

1 Comment

It’s time for me to pitch the Cape May Spring Weekend to any of you that might be interested in the chance to see Cape May and its birds in the Spring. I know Susan is pushing hard for the flock to head to Magee Marsh and she’s promising foot rubs, but Ohio’s the weekend before and why not make a week of it and stop by NJ on the way home?

😉

Click on the link above for details. The spring weekend has an entirely different feel than the fall (and hopefully it won’t rain the whole time again!) and is worth the trip, if for nothing else than the diminishing spectacle of shorebird migration along Delaware Bay. They’re also offering those wonderful back bay cruises that were cancelled for the fall festival.


I haven’t been down in the spring for a few years and it makes me sad to know that my memories of stopover shorebirds are history, even now.

Anyway… anybody want to think about it?

Birds, In the neighborhood, Pastimes, Whatever

Overheard at the bird observatory

13 Comments

An egg story to rival Delia’s:

“Hello? Is this the Audubon?”

You can assume this means trouble at 10 am on a Sunday morning.

“We had a bunch of dead trees cut down in our yard…”

Uh oh. Why don’t people know enough to do this in the Fall?

“and my husband was cleaning up the stump grindings and found this egg…”

Oh dear.

“buried about four inches down in the dirt.”

Huh?

“It’s huge! And I know it’s an owl egg because my neighbor is one of those people that’s into all that nature stuff and she looked it up on the Internet and she says that owls burrow down, you know, to make their nests and…”

The bird observatory is located in NJ. The person was calling from NJ.

“and the egg must weigh at least a pound and I think it’s still alive so I put it in a basket..”

Wasn’t Easter a couple weeks ago already?

“and filled the basket up with dirt and buried the egg again and it’s been out on my deck for the last couple days..”

In the sun, I hope.

“and I’m not sure what I should do because I think it’s alive and it’s so heavy and could I bring it to you and you’ll tell me what it is and maybe take care of it or whatever?”

Sure… bring it on over. We’ll sit on it and hatch it for you.

————————————————————————————————–

How do you think I handled this particular phone call? With patience? Did I cackle in this woman’s ear or take the rare opportunity to educate?

No. I asked her if she was certain it wasn’t just a really big rock.

Or a dinosaur egg, maybe.

Birds, Small truths, Snapshots, Travels with the flock, Wanderings

Birding in Delia’s backyard

15 Comments

Susan seems to think I have all these fabulous photos to share with you from our visit with Delia. Well… I don’t. I carried that darn camera with me everywhere and was distracted with laughing most of the time and didn’t get very many nice pics. But, there is this one from Delia’s backyard – isn’t it fabulous? As much as I love being near to the shore, I can easily imagine myself happy to have a view like this out my kitchen window. I’ve no idea what type of trees those are up on top of that mountain, but if they ever turn green or in the fall are colored with reds and yellows, and oranges – wow! Delia called that a ‘hill’ rather than a mountain, by the way, but to me used to the coast it all seemed pretty spectacular. Please click on the pic to enlarge!

It was really neat to see the places that Delia blogs about. It felt to me like she lives in the middle of nowhere, but that must come from my being too accustomed to traffic and noise and people. Made me wonder what in the world they do with themselves! But then I remembered when I first started reading Delia’s blog and she talked about building her own scope from scratch for birding, and then making an adapter for her camera for the scope she finally bought, and her posts about moon and starwatching, and all the time she spends birding in the marsh that’s in her backyard. Anyway… it seems like a nice life there in the ‘hills’ – even if there’s only one Dunkin Donuts within a hundred miles and you have to pump your own gas!

(Don’t ask – I’m sure Susan will embarass me with that story – even if she doesn’t have photos!)

So, we spent a couple hours ambling through the marsh, talking and laughing like old friends – which felt really nice – and doing the things that birders and naturalists like to do. Only we weren’t really serious about it, or didn’t bother trying to pretend to be serious. We just had fun in that easy way that near strangers can when they share a common interest. We scared up lots of ducks with our laughter, and thought of Lynne when we saw a TV, puzzled over some bloody feathers along the trail, spotted a stinker for Mary as it flew over the marsh, Susan and Delia chimped their way through a pile of canine scat – while I kept my fingers clean behind the camera! Good, clean fun… but for the picking through poop – come on girls! Yuck.

In the end, I came away feeling like a 10 year-old, jumping through mudpuddles with the silliness of it all. Who in their right mind drives all that way to show support for a friend, misses the main reason for going to begin with, and then is perfectly happy with a few hours of backyard birding and wet muddy feet before a long ride back home? (Click here for the story and opposite view of this pic.)

What I mean to say is that I’m so often amazed with the friendships that’ve developed as a result of this silly blogging we all do, yet furthering those friendships beyond just reading one another’s blogs feels like a very natural extension of the connections we’ve made here. I think to others who don’t ‘get it’, it must all seem pretty peculiar, yet we bloggers all carry around little bits of each other and one another’s lives, don’t we? Going out of our way a bit and meeting in ‘real life’ makes it feel almost like a homecoming of sorts. Or a 20 year class reunion… you remember these people, but you’re surprised with how your memory of them has changed since you last saw them (or read their most recent post.)

😉