Try being a bird. Want more pain? Try being a migrant bird. On their highly evolved natural calendars, spring, as measured by the First Leaf and First Bloom Indices is leaping forward not by hours but by days or even weeks. Our spring insect emergence, a natural event that migrant birds rely on, started in […]
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Herons, like Great Blue, Green, Night, Little, are known for their slow and deliberate hunting and fishing styles. Then there are the Tri-colored Herons. Tri-colored Herons frenetically ‘dance’ when fishing. Their signature first move is the Canopy. They form a canopy by spreading their wings to create a large shadow on the water’s surface. When […]
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Cedar Waxwings are notorious fruit and berry eaters. Zoologists consider them among the most frugivorous birds – a bird that thrives mostly on fruit and fruit-like produce of plants – in North America. Even their name is a reference to their frugivorous diets, they especially love cedar berries. In the fall large flocks can descend […]
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Red-headed Woodpeckers are striking North American woodpeckers. But their gorgeous looks have not kept them off the Partners In Flight’s Yellow Watch List, the list of species that require constant monitoring and long-term assessment to prevent further declines. In their case, further declines from the current 1%\year or 54% in total since mid-1960s. They are […]
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Large flocks of ‘Fall’ migrating Sandhill Cranes are no longer just using the farm fields of middle GA as a stopover, some are staying for the winter. Historically, eastern Sandhill Cranes fly to the Florida prairies for the winter. One exception is a population that winters near the Okefenokee Swamp & the Grand Bay Wildlife […]
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Different species of birds often stop their territorial bickering and competition to cooperatively forage together and improve one or both species’ success rate. This cooperation can take a variety of forms. For waterbirds it is often commensal, that is, one species benefits and the other neither benefits or is harmed. A common form of commensalism […]
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This post is for OM System OM-1 Mark 1 (OM-1) users. It documents most of my OM-1 settings, particularly for exposure and auto focus, and, in some cases, the rationale for choosing them. My intent is to provide context so that readers can decide if a setting choice aligns with their desired outcomes and\or shooting […]
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Birds do ‘cough’ like we do, but their coughing sounds are very different. We have diaphragms and birds don’t. When we cough, it’s our diaphragm that forces air through our vocal cords producing our deep, loud ‘coughing’ (hacking) sound. We have one larynx (voice box) at the beginning of our windpipes. Birds have a more […]
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Rusty Blackbirds have the steepest population decline of any North American songbird: 85-99% depending on location over the last 40 years. That’s why having them visit our yard is a special treat and a sign that bringing the yard back to a state more closely resembling the piedmont forest that was once here is paying […]
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Speculation Alert I can not find an authoritative source so I’m speculating that Georgia hosts an unusually large number of avian vagrants – birds outside their ‘normal’ ranges – each year and the number is increasing. Though not fully researched, at least by me, I don’t think this is unfounded speculation. How about y’all? Seeing […]
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