by Lanny McDowell on July 2, 2009
It’s not very hard to obtain decent bird photos of duck, goose and swan families this time of year. Whatever attitude you may hold about introduced species and the roles they play, Mute Swans are easy on the eyes, truly avian art in the most basic sense.
You know I have a schtick about getting close to my avian art subjects, so here is another set:
There is nothing wrong with this little guy’s leg. It’s just one of their postures, young and adult alike. They often seem to be doing exactly the same behavior or pose at the same time:
These images and Avian Art fine art prints are available for purchase. Contact me or View my gallery.
Birds are cool! Lanny
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by Lanny McDowell on July 2, 2009
It has been a bonanza year for raptor nests on the Vineyard. I have been keeping an eye on a Cooper’s Hawk nest not too far from the Lagoon in Vineyard Haven and also one up in Chilmark. There are three chicks in each of these, growing up fast. There are four active Cooper’s Hawk nests that I am aware of this year on Martha’s Vineyard. Some young have already fledged and some are still mostly fuzzy white.
There may be, and probably are, more breeding Cooper’s Hawks. Maybe some of the Vineyard’s Breeding Bird Atlasers will get back to me on this. One friend of mine insists there is a Sharp-shinned nest on his property, but we differ as to the raptor ID. It almost goes without saying that Ospreys and Red-taileds abound. Harriers are another matter. They are here, for sure, and nesting, but it can be hard to pin down just how many nests there are. This year at least, there is a dedicated and persistent group of observers doing just that at locations along the South Shore of the Vineyard. [click to continue...]
by Lanny McDowell on June 20, 2009
The beach drive out to Norton Point on the Vineyard’s south shore is only open for a portion of its length. The rest is closed because Oystercatchers, Piping Plovers and Least Terns have young to feed. And the beach should be closed. One of the Trustees of Reservations‘ “shorebird technicians” was headed out to make her protective rounds and told me there are something like 681 Least Tern pairs in the colony near the tidal cut into Katama Bay. That is a really nice big number of Least Terns, maybe a quarter of the state’s nesting pairs, according to the tech. We wish them all the luck they will need to fledge some youngsters. The odds are stacked against, but we can hope. We can resist recreational vehicles on the beach at the wrong time of the year. We can support the effort. [click to continue...]
by Lanny McDowell on June 6, 2009
Our Pennsylvania-based associate John Patrick Brown arranged a just-in-time house rental which offered us the option of either staying in a nice old farmhouse once owned by Lucky Luciano or using the current owners’ beach house right on Delaware Bay at a place called Highs Beach, which is just south from Cook’s and Reeds beaches, both well known as annual shorebird feeding and resting sites situated up the bay coast from Cape May.
The permits for Global Conservation Alliance (GCA) to conduct research this year specified Cook’s, Reeds, Moore’s and Gandy’s beaches as locations for our work. The procedure to collect Horseshoe crab eggs involved sampling certain marked plots according to protocols developed by Norm Famous, who has the credentials and background to do that sort of thing. Three of the four beaches were associated with the outlets of estuary systems draining out of extensive marshlands emptying into Delaware Bay from the New Jersey side. Two of the beaches were long uninterrupted stretches of sand. Two contained a variety of bayshore surfaces and substrata, including clay and silt layers, sections of peat and areas of mixed sand and pebbles washed by strong tidal currents.
Our objective was to identify places on the beach [click to continue...]
