Category: Birds

Posted on in Bird Profiles, Birds

Welcoming Juncos

dark-eyed-junco_lavetaco_20100320_lah_0458nefI just added bird #19 to my yard list. That may not sound like very many, but we only moved into our new house in May, and we had no landscaping until August. Birds are rarely attracted to bare dirt!

Not surprisingly, #19 was a Dark-eyed Junco. Vertical migrants, Juncos spend the summer up in the mountains, nesting in the conifers, and descend to lower elevations for the winter. At 7,100 feet , our house barely qualifies as a lower elevation; the park up the road, a mere 200 feet higher, hosts juncos all year.

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Posted on in Birds

15 Birdy Things to Do When You Can’t Go Birding

Today I was going to write a post about the birding excursion I had planned for the weekend. I expected to show colorful ducks, tricky-to-ID waders, and perhaps some cute little songbirds I saw skulking in the nearby bushes. However…

2015-10-29 20.26.14I sprained my ankle last week. I wish I had a good story to relate, but I simply thought the ground was where it wasn’t. (Happily, I landed between the two thorn bushes!) As you can see, the bump was pretty impressive but the x-rays proved nothing was broken; now it’s simply a matter of time and patience. I’m sitting around with my foot elevated, popping anti-inflamatories and catching up on Facebook. I have to get better soon—our kids and grandkids are coming for Thanksgiving!

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Posted on in Birds, Humor

Be the Bird!

Infant-Boys-Bluebird-Costume-L12234323-001With Halloween quickly approaching, the procrastinators among us are frantically searching for a brilliant, yet easy-to-execute costume idea. Since this is a birding (among other things) blog, I thought I’d offer a bit of inspiration—costume ideas I’ve collected from around the internet. I’m afraid not all of these look simple and easy to pull off at the last minute, but some were just too creative to pass up. Hopefully, these will get your creative juices flowing! (more…)

Posted on in Birding Trips

Birding Ramah SWA

RamahSWA-CO_LAH_7988I wanted to squeeze in at least one more field trip before the first snows, so I joined up with other members of our local Audubon chapter and headed out to Ramah State Wildlife Area. Located in Colorado’s eastern El Paso County, Ramah is surrounded by miles of shortgrass prairie. The views include cows, rolling hills, and Excel Energy’s new windmill farm. There’s a shallow valley that has been dammed to trap rain runoff in wet years.

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Posted on in Birds, Photography

Bird Photography: A few more tips

Pete photo of YCNH @EvergladesNP 31dec07 LAH 751This is the last (at least for a while) post in my series on better bird photography. If you missed the earlier posts, just type “bird photography” into the search box at right. I guess you could call these the odds and ends I didn’t mention earlier!

Line
I think of line as the path my focus takes as it moves through a photo. Where do I look first? Where do my eyes go from there? In these examples, my eyes follow an S-curve as I look at the Swan Goose, while they move diagonally through the photo of the Black-necked Stilt. There’s a reason that pictures of meandering rivers and paths are so popular. We visit all parts of the image as we wind our way through. (more…)