Zooming – April 2024
/Flowers (Nixa and Springfield MO, Sherman TX), – birds (Nixa and Springfield MO) – solar eclipse (Poplar Bluff MO)….a lot of zoomed images this month. Enjoy the 2024 slide show!
Ten Little Celebrations – April 2024
/April 2024 has been even more full of little celebrations than usual; it was challenging to choose the top 10!
Traveling with my daughter. Taking a road trip to Dallas (a familiar trek) is quite different when my daughter to with me. We start the driving a bit later and, this time, we stopped in Joplin on the way home for lunch. I celebrated the time in the car…the great conversation.
The life of a cousin. It was bittersweet to go to the funeral of a cousin that was younger than me…but it was clearly a celebration of her life.
20 puzzles for $2 each. The Friends of the Library book sale in my county included puzzles and I celebrated getting 20 of them for my dad and the other residents at his assisted living group home. I also celebrated a return to volunteering - helping with the book sale.
iPhone 15 Pro Max. Getting a new phone is always cause to celebrate….even though I started out a little anxious that it would a little challenging to go from my old Android phone to an iPhone; it was a pleasant surprise to realize it was pretty easy. The only downside was the reduced functionality of the Windows phone link app for text messages; that issue was resolved as soon as I transitioned to a Mac later in the month.
MacBook Air 15”. More new technology I am celebrating; it only took about 24 hours for me to become a fan of the Mac after using Intel-based machines since the 1980s.
Irises. The plants bloomed all at once. In one bed the stalks were too tall for them to remain standing to I cut them to enjoy indoors – celebrated the buds opening all along the stems.
14 ducklings. Seeing Mom Mallard with her ducklings is a great celebration of spring.
Solar Eclipse. So glad we made the effort to position ourselves to see a 2nd solar eclipse (the 1st for me was in 2017). It’s a phenomenon rare enough to be a celebration.
Belted Kingfisher. Celebrating a bird I didn’t expect to see around our neighborhood pond.
Kite and Pinata Festival. The botanical garden is a great place for outdoor celebrations like this.
30+ turtles and a belted kingfisher
/Almost every time I walk around our neighborhood pond there is something I don’t expect. One morning last week, I set out to see the ducklings. I didn’t see them at all. I took pictures of moss growing on the edges of the inflow channel to the large pond (noted some seeds that were accumulating there too). There were some water plants that were beginning to grow. I wondered how much of the pond they would cover this summer.
The first ‘unexpected’ sight was a row of 30+ turtles on a sunny bank. Seeing turtles was not unexpected…it was the large number that surprised me…and, based on the size variation, they are clearly breeding in our neighborhood ponds. . (Click on the image to see a larger version if you want to count them!)
Some of them might be large enough to pull down a duckling! I think they are almost all red-eared sliders although there was at least one that did not have the red-ear…maybe some other species.
I continued my walk and saw a dove on top of a bird house in a yard. The holes looked big enough that maybe they were nesting there. Another bird that I couldn’t identify was looking for tidbits on the ground…looking frequently skyward. Was there a predator around?
The barn swallows were swooping over the pond. There are a lot of them.But then something flew across the pond that was not a barn swallow. I managed to follow it well enough with my eye to see it alight in a willow…and then used the zoom on my camera: a belted kingfisher (male)….the second ‘unexpected’ of the day.
There is no vertical bank area around our pond where a kingfisher might build a nest…but I found myself wondering if the sinkhole near our neighborhood might be a place that would be acceptable. These birds burrow 3+ feet into vertical banks to build their nests. It would be great to have some resident kingfishers thriving on the small fish in our pond.
Laredo Birding Festival – Day 4
/The last day of birding at the Laredo Birding Festival started with the van leaving the hotel at 6 AM! It was the earliest start of the festival, but we were accustomed to it by that time. The front of the hotel was alive with activity in the darkness.
Our destination was the La Perla Ranch, prized for its habitat and plentiful birds that thrive near its sensational water features. They had the name of the place on the chairs at the hunting lodge!
The first bird of the morning was a Great Horned Owl on an antennae. What a great start to the day of birding! The bird seemed to be very scrutinizing our van breaking the calm of the morning.
The sun was not quite above the horizon yet…I got a silhouette of a Crested Caracara through a fence. The bird has a very distinctive profile.
And then we arrived at the hunting lodge the ranch provides…the sun came up. I liked the ‘barn’ birdfeeder in one of the trees.
A Turkey Vulture sat hunched in the top of a palm. Others were soring overhead. Some wild turkey moved rapidly our of my camera range…I missed photographing them entirely.
There were quite a few Meadowlarks although almost out of range of my camera’s zoom. This is an area where the Eastern and Western Meadowlarks overlap. They have such minor distinguishing characteristics; I’m just saying the bird in this photo is a Meadowlark.
We did some walking around ponds. Most of the birds were far away. Pied-billed Grebe are easy to distinguish from the Least Grebe (we saw both). My photo is of a Pied-Billed Grebe because it has dark eyes.
Just barely within the range of my zoom: a Green Kingfisher. The area south Texas along the Rio Grand is the only place to see this bird in the US. This one is female.
Cinnamon Teal were also on the ponds. The coloring of the male is indeed ‘cinnamon’!
I didn’t get a great picture – but was thrilled to see and get a photo of Peregrine Falcon. All the other ones I’ve photographed were on man-made structures (like bridges).
Sometimes I just paused and looked around at the ranch – glistening water surrounded by dry areas… wildflowers. It was a wonderful place to spend the day.
A Belted Kingfisher (female) surveyed the water from a dock on one of the ponds. We had seen a Ringed Kingfisher earlier on one of the larger ponds but I didn’t get a picture; I was surprised at how large it was.
How many birds can you identify in this picture?
The largest white bird is a Great Egret The smaller ones are Snowy Egrets. There are two types of cormorants: the Neotropic Cormorants are the smaller and darker ones; the larger and lighter ones are the Double-crested Cormorants. In the foreground are Ruddy Ducks with their tails pointing upward.
For the last picture of the day – a parade of Egrets (the Great Egret bringing up the rear)!
Baltimore Birding – part 1
/My husband and I participated in the Baltimore Birding Weekend this past weekend. It’s a new perspective on the city for us. On Saturday morning we participated in a session that started at Swann Park and then walked several segments of the Middle Branch Trail parking convenient to trail access: in the Harbor Hospital parking lot, on Warner Street near the Horseshoe Casino, then at the boathouse at Middle Branch Park on Waterview Ave. It rained for most of the time we were out, but my husband and I stayed dry enough in boots, rain pants and windbreakers (I used an umbrella part of the time because my windbreaker was not as waterproof as I thought it was).
Because it was raining and cloudy…and I was often holding the umbrella….I didn’t get as many pictures as usual although the umbrella enabled me to get more than I would have otherwise because it kept the rain off the camera. There were a lot more birds that I saw but couldn’t photograph. The bird pictures are often good enough for id but not much else. At the first stop (Swann Park) – I managed a double-crested cormorant (way out over the water) and killdeer (on the walkway ahead of us).
The second stop (accessed from the Harbor Hospital parking lot) was cut short by the path being flooded under a bridge. We did see a mallard family (4 ducklings) head out into the water before we turned around and went back to our cars.
We parked along Warner Street near the Casino next. Our destination was the Gwynn Falls/Middle Branch trail head, but we stopped to note the bird mural on one of the buildings.
There were a lot of smaller birds in the woods which I didn’t manage to photograph but the rain let up slightly and we stood on a bridge over the water. The trash was depressing (it is everywhere but particularly in the water…some of it probably came from a long way down the Patuxent River). The black-crowned night heron seemed to take it in stride.
There was a green heron nearby as well.
But the highpoint of being on the bridge was a belted kingfisher that flew toward us, under the bridge and then settled onto a branch. I took some pictures. It had a fish but made no move to swallow it….and then it flew on.
I’ll continue our adventure in Baltimore Birding in tomorrow’s post.
The Inn at Chachalaca Bend
/
Our main activity for the last day of the Rio Grande Valley Birding festival was breakfast (sumptuous) as the The Inn at Chachalaca Bend followed my a walk around the grounds looking at birds. We started near the Inn’s deck on the bank of La Resaca de las Antonias. We saw a Belted Kingfisher on the electrical wires crossing the Resaca almost immediately!
A Great Blue Heron and Great Egret had a little conference in the distance.
There was a broken tree trunk (or old telephone pole) near the water….a perch for an Altamira Oriole.
Directly across from the Inn an Anhinga dropped down into the water to capture a fish then walked back up a palm that was slanting over the water.
Nearby on a snag, a Golden Fronted Woodpecker searched for breakfast.
There was a ruckus and then a larger bird flew toward us over the water and sat on the electrical wire nearest us: a Ringed Kingfisher.
There was Great Kiskadee on the wire further away
And a Black-crowned Night-Heron in the vegetation across from where were standing.
The kiskadee flew away and we notice a kite (probably white tailed…but hard to tell for sure).
We left the Resaca to hike around some open field areas. We saw an American Kestrel looking at the meadow.
As we headed back almost to the edge of the path through a forested area, we looked up and saw masses of migrating American White Pelicans! There were several groups…maybe as many as 1,000 birds.
The path branched off to the edge of the Resaca again and we saw a Snowy Egret (note the yellow feet which is a distinctive feature for this bird even if the focus is not very good for the picture).
As we got ready to leave, we gathered back at the Inn and saw a hummingbird at the feeder (probably Ruby-throated).
There were a few plants I took pictures of…but they were secondary to the birds!
