Month: January 2012

I’m amazed when an experienced birder identifies a bird from it’s song, at least when it’s a sound I don’t recognize. After all, even I recognize the sound of a bluejay, an eagle, or a widgeon and a few others, but most bird calls are indistinguishable to me. I’m even more amazed when birders can identify a bird by their relative size and their flight pattern.

However, after several years of photographing ducks and other water birds, I’m beginning to be able to tell which bird it is simply by how they dive, as grebes and certain species of ducks have distinctive ways of diving when spooked. My favorite disappearing act is the Pied Grebe who literally just sinks into the water, but unfortunately I haven’t seen any Pied Grebes lately, certainly not yesterday which I spent at the ocean and northern Puget Sound shooting these shots, though they’re not the shot I was trying to take.

More often than not, this is all you’ll see of this sea duck if it sees you first, and it usually does,

resulting in this kind of shot of a Bufflehead.

This bird is larger than a Bufflehead, but perhaps equally shy.

You might recognize it as Red-Breasted Merganser, another bird I’ve been trying to get a good shot of lately.

This species virtually disappears into the water with little or no splash. You probably recognize it from yesterday’s post.

Once you have really watch a Horned Grebe’s dive

you’ll never confuse it with any other sea-bird. Like me, though, you may wonder how it is able to launch itself into the air and straight down. (Might be time to haul out the tripod and set my Canon to movie mode, to really see if I can figure it out in slow motion.)

If you recognize this bird by its dive, you’re a better birder than me.

I didn’t even recognize it as a Pigeon Guillemot in its non-breeding colors, but that’s a story for another day’s post.

Thought you might like to see how many “missed” shots I get. However, a digital camera lets you can shoot numerous shots without cost, except for the time it takes to sort them and discover how few of the day’s shots are actually worth keeping.

Between the long-promised rainy winter arriving and holiday activities, I only managed to get out birding once in the last two weeks of December. Even though Christmas is my favorite time of the year, I was beginning to feel cabin fever. On my birthday, I spotted a Varied Thrush in the backyard, but by the time I ran upstairs and got my camera it had disappeared. Disappointed, I left my camera in the dining room hoping it would return as it had in previous years.

Though I kept a lookout the whole day and most of the next day, New Year’s Eve, I didn’t spot it until 5:00 P.M., nearly dusk this time of year. At first all I could see was a silhouette that looked like an ordinary, if slender, robin. Only the magic of my Canon EOS 1D, Apple’s Aperture, and Adobe’s Photoshop revealed it was, indeed, a Varied Thrush,

a very cautious, if not downright shy, bird that insisted on keeping a tree between the two of us ,

though after nearly a half hour it finally rushed down the fence line.

Somehow it seemed like the perfect end to the year, completing another turn of the wheel, and once again bringing to mind Hardy’s Darkling Thrush:

I leant upon a coppice gate
      When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
      The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
      Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
      Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
      The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
      The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
      Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
      Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
      The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
      Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
      In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
      Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
      Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
      Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
      His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
      And I was unaware.

the first poem I ever voluntarily memorized, the one that inspired me to switch from a physics major to an English major and served as my New Year’s Day post for many years.