Category: birds

The Oven Bird

birds, wildlife

The Oven Bird

THERE is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

-Robert Frost-

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“Ovenbird, Autumn 2012”

Technical details: Canon EOS 7D camera,  EF400mm f/5.6L USM lens, ISO 640,  f/5.6, 1/200 sec

Nature’s Mouths

birds, wildlife

“How many mouths Nature has to fill, how many neighbors we have, how little we know about them and how seldom we get in each other’s way!  Then to think of the infinite numbers of smaller fellow mortals, invisibly small, compared with which the smallest ants are as mastodons.”

-John Muir-

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“Red-shouldered Hawk Nest, SNR 2012”

Technical details: Canon EOS 7D camera,  EF400mm f/5.6L USM lens, ISO 400,  f/6.3, 1/125 sec

The Sedge Wren

birds, wildlife

“…wildlife once fed us and shaped our culture.  It still yields us pleasure for leisure hours, but we try to reap that pleasure by modern machinery and thus destroy part of its value.  Reaping it by modern mentality would yield not only pleasure, but wisdom as well.”

-Aldo Leopold-

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“Sedge Wren, Autumn 2012”

Technical details: Canon EOS 7D camera,  EF400mm f/5.6L USM lens, ISO 800,  f/5.6, 1/160 sec

Marshland Elegy

birds, wildlife

Marshland Elegy

by

Aldo Leopold

“A dawn wind stirs on the great marsh.  With almost imperceptible slowness it rolls a bank of fog across the wide morass.  Like the white ghost of a glacier the mists advance, riding over phalanxes of tamarack, sliding across bog-meadows heavy with dew.  A single silence hangs from horizon to horizon.

Out of some far recess of the sky a tinkling of little bells falls soft upon the listening land.  Then again silence.  Now comes a baying of some sweet-throated hound, soon the clamor of a responding pack.  Then a far clear blast of hunting horns, out of the sky into the fog.

High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks, and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness, but without yet disclosing whence it comes.  At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds.  On motionless wings they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds.  A new day has begun on the crane marsh.”

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“A Great Echelon of Birds”

Technical details: Canon EOS 7D camera, EF500mm f/4.5L USM lens, ISO 640,  f/5.6, 1/1250 sec

Bill’s Day Nature Log 12/15/2012

birds, Nature Log
  • Slept in a bit after reading the unpromising weather forecast.  Was out the door at 9:00 heading to Shaw Nature Reserve.
  • I was a bit concerned with arriving at SNR so late, but then I remembered, if the conditions are anything less than perfect the majority will stay away.  I saw only a few folks on the trails.
  • Weather conditions were quite poor for bird photography: very windy, mostly cloudy with fast moving clouds causing constantly changing light.
  • Not very birdy.  Even usual favorite spots were quite slow. Looking for winter sparrows and BRCR, but finding neither.
  • Officially one of my favorite things: walking through a recently burned area.  Love the smell of the wildfire, the still-smoking embers, watching the Flickers pick through the ashes, assuming they are picking up half-cooked grubs and other goodies.
  • I would love to take a year off of everything and follow the Flickers.  So many questions that I would like answered: Why does it seem that whole groups or population? move in and out of areas.  One week, I’ll see dozens, then I won’t see a one for a month.  Why are they so often seen on the ground, even in turf?  What is the nature of these relatively large groups they seem to stay in?  Are they closely related?
  • I did see a few Wild Turkeys plucking around a recently burned section of new savannah.
  • Water in creeks!
  • Spring Peepers being quite vocal.
  • Kentucky Coffee Tree seed pods were dropping.  Of course I took one.  Ate a bit of the resinous and sweet goo that covers seeds.
  • I noticed the large river bottom prairie has been planted with trees!  Something in the red-oak family.  I’m sure the expert habitat restorers know what is best, but I enjoyed this area and the habitat edges it provided.  Usually overflowing with birds and one of the best spots for insects I know of.  We’ll see what it will turn into.

“Eastern Bluebird, SNR, Autumn 2012”

Technical details: Canon EOS 7D camera, EF500mm f/4.5L USM lens, ISO 640,  f/6.3, 1/1600 sec
  • Left for RMBS and arrived with a couple hours of light left to photograph the Trumpeter Swans.  Lighting and background clouds were quite nice.
  • A distinct Tundra Swan could be heard constantly in the larger group.  It never did come close enough to take that “species distinction” shot.

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“Changing Skies”

Technical details: Canon EOS 7D camera, EF500mm f/4.5L USM lens, ISO 640,  f/7.1, 1/2000 sec
  • First good workout with complete gear package of 500mm and the new Sidekick mount.  Worked beyond expectations.  So glad I decided to get the Sidekick, although I hated to make another expenditure so soon following lens.  So much better than trying to use ballhead alone for lens support.
  • Worked great on monopod and BH-30 ballhead for ~4 mile hike.  Very stable support for monopod.
  • Also worked great on tripod with BH-40.  I can’t imagine a much better support for this combo.
  • Many thanks to Iris Dement for the lyrics to use for the title of the pic below.  These are a pair of obviously worn birds.  Most of the birds today came in with muddy feet, being out in the fields feasting on “wasted” grain.

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“I Never Dreamed Today Would Come, When Love Was Young”

Technical details: Canon EOS 7D camera, EF500mm f/4.5L USM lens, ISO 800,  f/5.6, 1/1600 sec

A Mouthfull

birds, wildlife

“A sense of history should be the most precious gift of science and of the arts, but I suspect that the grebe, who has neither, knows more history than we do.  His dim primordial brain knows nothing of who won the Battle of Hastings, but it seems to sense who won the battle of time.  If the race of men were as old as the race of grebes, we might better grasp the import of his call.  Think what traditions, prides, disdains, and wisdoms even a few self-conscious generations bring to us!  What pride of continuity, then, impels this bird, who was a grebe eons before there was a man.”

-Aldo Leopold-

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“Peid-billed Grebe with Fish”

Technical details: Canon EOS 7D camera, EF500mm f/4.5L USM lens, ISO 640,  f/5.6, 1/800 sec

Swoop of a Hawk

birds, wildlife

“The outstanding characteristic of perception is that it entails no consumption and no dilution of any resources.  The swoop of a hawk, for example, is perceived by one as the drama of evolution.  To another it is only a threat to the full frying-pan.  The drama may thrill a hundred successive witnesses; the threat only one – for he responds with a shotgun.”

-Aldo Leopold-

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“Red-tailed Hawk”

Technical details: Canon EOS 7D camera, EF500mm f/4.5L USM lens, ISO 640,  f/8, 1/1000 sec

Tennessee

birds, wildlife

“That thing called ‘nature study’, despite the shiver it brings to the spine of the elect, constitutes the first embryonic groping of the mass-mind toward perception.”

-Aldo Leopold-

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“Tennessee Warbler – Autumn Migration 2012”

Technical details: Canon EOS 7D camera,  EF400mm f/5.6L USM lens, ISO 500,  f/5.6, 1/640 sec