I'll fly when I'm good and ready, thank you very much

Even at such a young age, this part of the owl is less huggable than the previous post. While driving the auto tour at Ridgefield this past May, I came across a few people who had stopped in the forest. Two great horned owls had just fledged, one had taken its first flight but this one wasn’t quite so eager to test its wings.

This is the first shot I took, unfortunately it was severely overexposed but while I took more pictures of the owl, it never again looked at me, apparently unimpressed by my beak and talons. One of the parents was keeping a close eye on its young charge, who was more in a mood to sleep than to learn to fly.

I didn’t see it take the leap that day but for the next month the two young owls could be seen from the road, although much farther into the forest, with one of the adults always close by.

Downy soft

My downy feathers are huggably soft,
My beak and talons are huggably not.

Who am I?

Many feathers, many colors, many patterns, one bird

Ben Franklin once wrote his daughter that a poorly drawn insignia looked less like a bald eagle and more like me, which didn’t displease him since even I would have been a better representative of the young United States than the eagle.

Who am I?

Daddy makes one

One of the nice things about visiting Maine to spread my mother-in-law’s ashes was getting to meet many people on her side of the family that I hadn’t met before. The family resemblance was strong in the siblings, but they weren’t the only ones. On a visit to one of the aunts, a family of hairy woodpeckers nicely showed off not only the differences in their plumages but also one of the features that distinguishes them from the similar downy woodpecker — that long glorious beak.

In both hairies and downies, males have a red patch at the back of their heads while females do not. Juveniles have a red patch atop their heads, which my Sibley guide notes is occasionally yellow in hairies. On this particular juvenile the patch was noticeably orange. Another trait shared between downies and hairies is that females tend to have shorter beaks than males, making it more difficult to distinguish between a male downy and female hairy if you don’t get a good look. Complicating matters is that the two species are spread across much of the U.S. and Canada and overlap ranges in most of those regions.

I’m not a top flight birder, so there have been many times where if I don’t get a good look at a bird hammering in the treetops, my field notes just say “downy or hairy woodpecker”. These woodpeckers posed so perfectly, however, that they left little doubt.

Momma makes two

Baby makes three

A preening tom pauses to show his beautiful face

Snood & Wattle is:

• The long-awaited sequel to Turner & Hooch
• Portland’s newest eatery specializing in Willamette Valley wines
• My nicknames for Sam and Emma
• Red fleshy bits on a turkey’s head

If you’re particularly clever, you might have guessed the answer from the pictures. The snood hangs over the top of the beak while the wattle hangs below.

Such a lovely bird!

A tom gives me the once over

I’m a night owl by nature so one of the hardest lessons in photography for me to take to heart is to be up early and often. The reptilian part of my brain does its best to get me to go back to sleep when the alarm clock rings, so some deeply buried part of my consciousness has to struggle with all its might to win out and get me up and out of bed.

While we were in Maine, it was a little easier to win that battle as I knew I had an opportunity to photograph creatures I’ve rarely seen since moving to the west coast. After visiting Gilsland Farm Audubon Center one afternoon, I returned four more times at sunrise and am glad I did, even if it left me pretty tired by the end of the trip. It was the third and fourth visits that yielded my best pictures, such as this wild turkey that visited to feed most of the mornings of my visit.

The lesson that I need to make the most of my opportunities was further driven home Friday evening, when I was deeply saddened to learn one of my favorite photographers was showing his final images. He picked up his camera for the last time in May as debilitating health problems have left him unable to hold his gear.

You never know.

Yeeeooowww that's cold!

I’ve toyed with the idea of starting a series of pictures about the ones that got away — pictures were I almost got what I was looking for, but one or two things didn’t come together like I hoped.

I spent a lot of time watching this swallow and took some pictures as he sang. Tree swallows don’t usually open wide to sing but they do open wide to yawn. The swallow was several feet above me, so before taking a picture I waited until he angled his head down towards me to get a more pleasing profile. But when he yawned he threw his head back and I couldn’t get the angle I wanted.

The thing I do like about the picture is it reminds me of the expression on Sam’s face after we adopted him as a kitten and took him to the vet for an exam. An instrument was inserted in a place none of us wants instruments to be inserted and a look of great surprise shot across his face.

A male tree swallow peeks out of a tree cavity where it is building its nest

Tree swallows nest in seemingly every tree cavity during the spring at Ridgefield. I love when they poke their heads out of the holes and made an effort to photograph them this spring. For this accommodating swallow I photographed it from both the front and side. It was a cloudy day so I set the exposure to blow the background to white.

A tree swallow in need of a good preening

I had settled in to watch a nuthatch flying back and forth to his nest when I noticed this tree swallow and his mate in the tree not far from me. I shifted my gaze and my camera lens back and forth between the two sets of birds for some time. Since the swallows weren’t disturbed by my presence, I used the opportunity to try some close-up shots of the male.

The male looked a little disheveled with a feather out of place, understandable given the frenetic pace of the nesting season.

Has anybody seen the white-breasted nuthatch? It was right here, I swear!

Some birds go to great lengths to discourage predators from raiding their nests. This white-breasted nuthatch went the route of disguise, using a grub as a fake mustache.

Cleaning out the nursery

An oak gall provides a natural perch for a house wren as it carries debris out of its nest. While the wren’s little beak is fine for excavating debris, it’s not much use at excavating the cavity itself. Like many forest residents, this house wren used a pre-existing cavity drilled by woodpeckers. I took many pictures but most came out blurry thanks to the frenetic pace with which the little bird hurled the debris from its new home.

This great horned owl kept its fledglings on a short leash

This great horned owl kept a close eye on its recently fledged youngsters over the course of several weeks. The owls were usually in sight from the auto tour at Ridgefield and became the stars of the spring at the refuge. I saw them many times but usually not in great light, so it was nice to see them in the warm light near sunset. Unfortunately the gates of the refuge close fairly early so I had to leave the owls before I wanted and head towards the exit.

See, not every bird picture I take is a tight close-up

While photographing a bee swarm at Ridgefield, off in the distance there was a quick flash of red. When I looked up this male pileated woodpecker was hammering into the soft wood, allowing a few quick shots before flying off into the distance.

Pileateds are our largest woodpecker in the United States, unless of course the ivory-billed is only mostly extinct.

A house wren uses it beak to preen its tail feathers

It took me a while to warm up to the little brown birds in general and house wrens in particular. But this spring I had a few nice encounters with house wrens and now I’m hooked. This wren gave me a spectacular view of its long tail feathers when it flew onto a rotten tree branch to preen.

The blue bee eater

Scrub jays do not belong to the class of birds known as bee-eaters that specialize in eating bees, but nonetheless this one had a strong predilection for them. A colony of bees had taken up residence in a cavity of this tree, and the jay used a nearby rock as a launching off point to fly in to snare one of the bees before returning to the rock to eat it.

Not much later the colony split and sent a swarm off to establish a new colony, so now the jay can dine out when the mood strikes.

A male black-headed grosbeak eats berries while laying over during the spring migration

In mid-May I had my first chance to photograph black-headed grosbeaks as they stopped at Ridgefield during migration. I got some nice pictures of females, it’s not typical I get good pictures of an animal on my first try so I was pretty pleased, although disappointed not to get the male in the group that stayed out of sight.

But the very next week, at the end of a 13-hour day at the refuge, this male popped into a bush I had been watching and gave me a couple of poses as it dined on the bush’s berries. I spent as much time at Ridgefield as I could as you never know how long an opportunity will last during migration. Particularly true this time, as I didn’t see a single grosbeak the very next day, nor the next week, and with the berries mostly gone I knew they weren’t likely coming back.

A male tree swallow brings a feather back to the nest

I spent many hours in May at Ridgefield watching tree swallows nesting in seemingly every available tree cavity. In the first few weeks, I tried in vain to get shots of them collecting dried grasses to line their nests. Never did get that shot but was even more pleased at the end of the month to catch this male coming back to the nest with a large feather (large to him at least) to provide a soft feather bed for his mate and the coming hatchlings.

I wanted to photograph the sparrow’s notched tail but changed my tack when the sun suddenly broke through the fog and cast a shadow of its tail onto the sign. In the environmental portrait below, while the notch may not be visible with the tail feathers spread out, even from a distance the yellow eye-stripe stands out.

An early morning encounter with a Wilson's snipe

I arrived early one April morning at Ridgefield and was going to sit beside Quigley Lake to watch and listen to the blackbirds. As I started to pass a car parked on the south side of the lake I noticed a lovely sight across the road, a Wilson’s snipe just above the waterline. The snipe were actively calling out around the refuge but this little beauty was silent during our brief encounter. I didn’t stay long since I was blocking the road and I could see in my review mirror that with each passing moment more and more cars were pouring onto the auto tour.

I’m not as into shorebirds as many birders but even I love every encounter with these enigmatic birds.

When I came across this little sparrow singing next to the auto tour on a foggy spring morning, I knew I had a good chance at close-ups. I attached the tele-converter to the big lens to get as much magnification as I could, set the beanbag on the window, and brought the camera to my eye. All I saw was a big blurry blob in the viewfinder.

Too close!

I was within the minimum focusing distance of the camera, so I quickly added an extension tube and my beautiful little friend came into sharp focus. Fortunately it was comfortable with my presence so despite my early mistakes I got the pictures I was looking for. The first batch of photos were taken with fog in the background so I let the background go white, later the fog cleared a bit and I had some soft blue skies as a backdrop.

In the first picture, the sparrow’s bulked up look comes from it fluffing out its feathers. In the others it is in various stages of the classical head-thrown-back pose that comes with the song.