Category Archives: Birds

October 12, 2021 · 23:28

Fine Feathered Friends – Spotted Towhee

“What happened to all of the bird pictures?” I hear you asking. (No, really, I hear it.) Good question. “Life,” would be the answer, but said in character as Marvin the Paranoid Android (aka Marvin the Manically Depressed Robot).

But there are plenty of unseen bird pictures from earlier in the year, including a couple that I’ve never shown, so here you go!

I’ve only ever seen this guy four, maybe five times, and I’ve only gotten decent pictures twice. He’s a Spotted Towhee.

We have LOTS of California Towees. They’re pretty plain looking, dark, dark brown or gray.

The Spotted Towhee is quite stunning in comparison to their California cousins.

Black head, brownish-red belly, white band at the throat, black and white speckled back.

This one was living in our bushes for a month or two, from late April to mid July.

Not sure why this one moved on, especially given all of the free seed that gets scattered about every day.

However, since I only ever saw the one male, perhaps even daily free means wasn’t enough incentive to keep him here when female companionship was needed.

He obviously didn’t mind sharing the dinner table (i.e., the back yard) with the squirrels, mourning doves, California Towhees, juncos, and other residents.

I’ll keep an eye out. Maybe he’ll come back with a female that he’s regaled with tails of a California paradise.

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October 9, 2021 · 23:46

Hawks

Another quick, impromptu test of what the iPhone 13 will do. I was out in the yard, catching up on some cleanup work and I had been hearing the hawks for a few minutes. Just like the soundtrack of the establishing shot in every Western movie ever made…

I heard them getting closer, so pulled the phone out, put it in video mode and started recording. No tripod, no instructions, just let’s see what happens. Here’s a 10-second shot that I edited out, when the pair was right overhead and maybe 300-400 feet up.

The sound isn’t overwhelming, but turn it up and watch it in full screen mode. Right around the four-second mark, when the second hawk flys in from the top, you can hear them calling.

It doesn’t suck for a five minute break from yard work.

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September 14, 2021 · 23:03

They Found Out

When I went to check the mail this afternoon, I started to notice feathers on the lawn as I approached the mailbox. Lots of feathers.

Feathers on the sidewalk. In the flowers. In the dirt.

Feathers on the sidewalk. Feathers in the street for 50 feet or more downwind in the street.

Somewhere nearby, there was a hawk (or an owl) who was going to eat well tonight. And one less mourning dove. (They’re a long, long way from rare.)

WARNING: From here I start to spout off about California and US politics…

So, let’s think about today’s California gubernatorial recall election, where currently, just before 23:00 PDT, the New York Times page is showing the recall failing 66% to 34% with 64% of the votes counted…

Let’s say that the mourning dove was the GOP, sitting fat and sassy, oblivious to reality, believing themselves immune from consequences…

Let’s say that the hawk (or owl) was the people of California, completely fed up with this 100% high grade toxic bullshit that the GQP is pushing…

Like the mourning doves, there’s plenty more where that one came from.

This is where the analogy starts to break down, because the least of those mourning doves is a veritable Rhodes Scholar compared to the GQP’s finest. Comparing the IQ and common sense of a Republican to a mourning dove is an insult to the mourning dove. I had better not be parking my car under any of the wires they perch on.

Case in point, the GQP started releasing web sites yesterday alleged voter fraud that cost them the election. Yep, they were saying that over 24-hours before the actual election. So take their fraud allegation story with a large grain of salt and recognize it as the insane, fascist, undemocratic lie that it is.

The reality that they can’t accept is that there is no massive secret conspiracy to rig the election in favor of the Democrats. The simple fact is that the Republicans are lower than whale shit and folks are no longer believing their lies.

As I’ve noted, my pinned Tweet says:

No need to change that any time soon that I can see.

And finally, to paraphrase a popular joke about lawyers:

What do you call 1,000,000 Republicans buried up their chins in sand?

Not enough sand!

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August 17, 2021 · 23:19

Fine Feathered Friends – August 17th

We haven’t talked about the flying critters here recently. Let’s go back to that again, this time with some pictures of ravens.

Three batches of photos – the first is from a raven that sits on top of the telephone pole at the bottom of the driveway.

One of the traits that makes me believe these are ravens instead of crows is the squawking and croaking they do instead of the traditional “caw” sound that the crows make.

Another is that honkin’ huge beak. Plus, these guys will sit out there and “talk” to me (while the neighbors no doubt are mentally fitting me for a straight jacket) while the crows won’t.

In general, another trait I notice is that the ravens will perch lower down – on top of telephone poles, in the lower branches of the pines out in back, and so on. The crows seem to perch way up in the top of the trees.

Plus, the ravens seem to be larger, and they’re always loners while the crows tend to fly around in groups (“murders,” I know) of up to a couple dozen.

Ravens and crows are both very intelligent. I’m told they can learn to recognize individual humans, and they’ll hold a grudge if you try to hurt them.

I’m always trying to make friends, feeding them a little when I can. I would like to put out a suitable feeder, but the squirrels make that difficult.

When they squawk, they can make quite the ruckus. I’m not sure what they’re saying, but they’re certain of their sincerity.

I’m not so fond of the Baltimore football team named after them, but these guys are welcome any time. They’re great conversationalists, even if neither one of us understands the other.

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June 9, 2021 · 23:04

Fine Feathered Friends – June 09th

On Sunday I told the story of a pair of red-tail hawks that I saw just after I got home with groceries. The first was the literal embodiment of “death from above,” while the second perched on the telephone pole across the street and gave me time to take some pictures.

Thank you for staying there while I grabbed the camera from inside the house!

What are you looking at? Okay, I know that I outweigh this dude (dudette? I don’t know) by about a factor of 100 or so, but I would still give him at least even odds if he really, REALLY decided to take his chances with me.

Now looking for lunch, having apparently decided that I’m not it. Probably too tough and stringy to eat.

Anything downhill? That’s where his mate went with her mourning dove entrée.

What’s that, a lizard? Or maybe one of the bunnies in the bushes?

After taking pictures for over five minutes and praying that he wouldn’t take off, I was now wanting to catch some photos of him flying off (and I needed to rescue those groceries from the car…). Finally he starts to stretch.

And he’s off! Look at those claws! Okay, so forget my 50/50 comment, the betting’s now 60/40 on the hawk.

You can see why their called “red-tailed” hawks! Out over the canyon and gone…

Time to go grab the groceries out of the car.

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June 8, 2021 · 23:06

Big Clouds, Mid-Sized Jets, Tiny Hummingbirds

Big clouds. Broken. Puffy. Probably VFR conditions breaking through that deck, but I don’t know if I would push my luck and go through on a check ride.

More clouds to the north but a different pattern. Can you see the tiny hummingbird?

Now can you find the tiny hummingbird? How about the mid-sized jet? A Southwest 747 to be exact, going straight in to Burbank Runway 8. Small compared to the clouds, huge compared to the hummingbird, mid-sized compared to a 747.

It’s all perspective.

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Filed under Birds, Flying, Photography, Weather

June 6, 2021 · 23:40

Bird Pictures In Mind Only

Two experiences today where I was either without a camera (and it happened really fast) or I had a camera and something happened too fast to move, focus, and shoot.

Experience The First – Death From Above

I had done my usual Sunday morning COVID-based grocery run and pick up of breakfast. As I pulled into the driveway and got out, I saw a pair of red-tail hawks circling a quarter-mile or so down to the south, maybe 500′ above us. I locked the car and walked around to the trunk, popped it open, and for whatever reason I looked south for the hawks and couldn’t see them. As I looked, I heard the cry of a hawk directly overhead (exactly like the sound effect used in every Western since the first talkie hit the flicks), looked up, and saw one of them with wings tucked, in a full dive. “Death From Above” indeed!

Across the street, perched on a telephone wire, was a mourning dove. The hawk at the last second in an eyeblink extended his wings, hit the brakes, extended his claws, and that mourning dove EXPLODED into a cloud of feathers. Out of this fluttering mass of feathers emerged the hawk with its lunch, struggling a bit with the weight of its prey, but as the hill drops of pretty swiftly it made it off with no problem into the trees a couple of houses down.

As I was picking up my jaw from seeing that, the other red-tail hawk swooped in low from behind our house, crossed to where the kill had been, and perched on the power line transformer on top of the pole. I have to wonder if it went there since it was very close to where the kill had just happened, the hawk logic being that where there was one fat, slow bird, there might be others. This time I did grab my camera (as I took the cold food and hot breakfast into the house) and spent several minutes taking pictures as the second hawk scanned the neighborhood for its lunch. It finally flew off to look elsewhere, just as the memory card on my camera filled up. (RAW files will do that…)

Pictures will follow this week (probably) as I get time to process them.

Experience The Second – Buzzed By Fighters

After replacing the memory card with a new one, I was out taking pictures of the hummingbirds. There’s a whole drama thing going on with them (again, pictures to follow one of these days) but at one point the very territorial male Anna’s Hummingbird was chasing a Rufous Hummingbird away from one of the feeders.

I had been taking pictures of the Anna’s and through the lens saw the Rufous zoom through the field of view toward the feeder. The Anna’s took off like a Spitfire scrambling to take on fleet of German bombers during the Battle of Britain. The Rufous did a hard right and headed right toward my face with the Anna’s, neon red neck feathers on full display, right behind them. They went past my left ear just slightly under Mach One, just like a biological Top Gun dogfight.

It was awesome!

I don’t know if a newer, faster, better camera would have caught it (it might have – they’re pretty good these days, especially at the high end, while my two are like fifteen years old) but my didn’t even try, so no pictures for you, sorry!

“Pics Or It Didn’t Happen!”

Don’t even start with me…

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May 31, 2021 · 23:37

Fine Feathered Friends – May 31st

As we put a stake in the heart of May and bid it adieu, another new bird showed up out of nowhere today.

Yellow birds stand out – we don’t get many of them. Which is why I was so surprised to see this one just a couple of days after the yellow-headed blackbird showed up here.

My first thought was that it might be one of the yellow-rumped warblers that we have all over, which don’t have what *I* would consider to be exceedingly yellow rumps, but maybe this was a different sex or subspecies than I normally see. But the Cornell Lab app says differently.

The Merlin app at Cornell Labs identifies this bird as a “Pacific-slope flycatcher.” It also notes that they’re almost identical and difficult to distinguish from the Cordilleran flycatcher – but the Pacific-slope flycatcher’s range includes Southern California and the coast, while the Cordilleran flycatcher stays in the mountains of Arizona and down into Mexico.

Which makes me wonder. I haven’t been obsessed with seeing and IDing different birds – but on the other hand I have been watching and keeping my eyes open and living within a mile or two of here for thirty years. So is there some improvement in my observations that has multiple new species being seen here in just the last few months? Or are we actually getting more variety and newer-ish species of birds coming into this area?

Beats me!

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May 27, 2021 · 23:20

Fine Feathered Friends – May 27th

A fantastic new visitor today, out of the blue! But first, a lesson.

I’ve often watched professional photographers at weddings or other social events. Many of them will habitually take a quick glance at the image on the back of the camera every dozen or so shots, particularly after they’ve changed a lens, a camera body, or some setting on the camera. Today I learned why that’s an excellent habit to start training myself in. Because if you’re doing astrophotography (for example, for no particular reason) and you have the camera on full manual mode with the exposure set at 1/100 second because you were taking pictures of the nearly full moon through a high-powered telescope (for example, for no particular reason) and then something happens outside and you grab the camera and start taking pictures without realizing that you’re still on full manual mode while in bright, daylight conditions where you really should be shooting at about 1/2000 second, you’ll get this:

Noting wrong with your computer, phone, or tablet – there’s an image there, click on it. It’s 100% white, overexposed by a factor of twenty.

Fortunately, I realized the error in time and this particular fine feathered friend hadn’t flown off yet, so I got at least a couple of images. And they’re pretty cool!

I was just going to take the trash cans out and this guy was above the neighbor’s sidewalk, directly across the street. He stood out.

I remember seeing him or one of his close relatives in our back yard, once, shortly after we moved in three years ago. The Cornell Labs bird ID app confirmed what I suspected from that first encounter.

This is a yellow-headed blackbird. Their permanent range is along the Colorado River from the US/Mexico border into Nevada, around Las Vegas, but they’re occasionally seen here and there in Southern California. It’s possible to see them sometimes pretty much anywhere west of the Mississippi and east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, but they’re not terribly common in the LA Metro area.

A most pleasant surprise and beautiful visitor, as well as a lesson learned (I hope) in my photography practices!

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May 23, 2021 · 18:04

Fine Feathered Friends – May 23rd

Another bird that’s common around here (like the mockingbirds) is the mourning dove.

Being “common” isn’t a slam, just a fact. The finches are common, and they got a ton of press here when they had a nest right outside the kitchen window last year.

I’ve tended to focus on the “new” species (the hummingbirds, the juncos, the wrens, the woodpeckers, and so on) and have some more coming up, but I don’t want to let the “common” species get shortchanged.

So, many of you have probably seen mourning doves, or heard them.

They have that stereotypical dove body and head, gray-ish brown with darker spots.

Also look for the weird, brighter than average red feet. (Well, *I* think they’re weird.)

Lots of folks will hear that call and think it’s an owl, particularly since mourning doves will continue to call past sunset and will start before sunrise. It’s not an owl, although the sounds are a bit similar.

They’re not the fastest birds in the race, and when they take off (slowly…) there’s a a lot of noise and wing flapping and some rapid, high-pitched “coo! coo! coo!” sounds with each flap as they grunt sort of like a tennis player with a monstrous serve.

In this neighborhood, a couple of times of year we’ll find a patch of mourning dove feathers spread out over a few square yards of lawn. That’s what a slow takeoff will get you in a neighborhood full of real owls and hawks.

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