Tales of the birding experience and finding the artistic and the spiritual in avian photography
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Scanning the plowed fields at the Farm Institute in Katama has been de rigeur for the past couple of weeks, anyway, for the regulars, and also for the more sought-after Upland Sandpiper and Buff-breasteds. Neither of each until yesterday, when Rob Culbert, pro ecologist and local birding guide, emailed some of the local birders that on his Saturday morning field trip rounds he had espied up to five buffies bobbing and poking their way around the field. [click to continue...]
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Take a course in good water and air, and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.
John Muir
Especially when someone looking at bird photography sees a lot of detail in the avian subject, feathers in sharp focus or a shiny glint in the bird’s eye, he or she wonders how it is accomplished. Often the viewer concludes, “Oh, well, the big lens!” “What kind of glass are you using?” is the more camera-savvy question. Guess what? It can be the humongous and fast prime lens on the oversized gimbled tripod … on a bright sunny day … bird posed at the edge of the nest … shot from the sturdy platform of the observation tower in the well-managed nature sanctuary. Nothing wrong with that. Do whatcha gotta do, I say.
Here’s what I go for, though. What I seek out and what rings my avian art bell is: first of all, it almost does not matter what the species is; [click to continue...]
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All three of us had pretty much given up on getting to the Jersey shore during spring migration this year. It looked like our non-profit, Global Conservation Alliance, was going to be a blowout for 2009, which , if that did not concern Red Knots and other declining stocks of migrant shorebirds, might not be such a big deal in itself; but wasting a year would have been a real shame in this case.
In order to have a chance of carrying out work on the beaches of Delaware Bay that might result in healthier (and heavier) Red Knots leaving on the last northern leg of their annual journey up to the Arctic, certain scientific requirements need to be met. If anyone wants to access the restricted beaches where the birds feed, or if anyone wants to physically disturb the surface of those beaches, they have to apply for and receive permits from the state powers that be to do that work. You can’t just show up and start digging up the sand.
Norm Famous, one of our number who is a wetlands ecologist by profession, put together GCA’s application to New Jersey Fish & Wildlife to conduct two experiments [click to continue...]
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My friend Pete says that he had White-eyed Vireo, one or two, at this location at least three weeks ago and maybe earlier. The Vineyard Birds II book lists the earliest record for white-eyed as April 29th. That sure sounds late, but who knows, and how many white-eyeds are seen and recorded on Martha’s Vineyard every spring? Not that many. Pete and I were at the pumping station at the head of the Lagoon on the morning of May tenth. We met up there with Sally, who was on her appointed spring birding rounds. Everything looked quite dull at first, although a close look at breeding yellow-rumpeds and yellow warblers should not really qualify as dull. Then we heard the vireo’s call and then the full song. He acted very much like a local, not a transient, to my eyes, as though he were not just passing through. Of course I already knew he had been seen in the same general spot a number of times, which very likely shaded my judgement. We saw no evidence that he was gleaning to feed a mate on a nest. He did sing up a storm, as the photos imply.
The only other migrant of note that we found was a Tennessee Warbler. Pete knew the song. I was trying to make it into some variable of a Winter Wren. We did see it, but mostly we heard its distinctive call and could not relocate it even though all three of us were scanning nearby vegetation for quite a while, trying to get an angle on it. I think it was throwing its song around like a ventriloquist. We would hear the song; but then two of us would point in directions about ninety degrees apart. We also remarked that it was feeding and singing close to the ground, rather than favoring the canopy habitat where you might expect it.
The butter-butt photo is a reminder of how exotic a fully feathered example can be.
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