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Showing posts with label Blue Jay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blue Jay. Show all posts

Saturday, July 7, 2018

North Carolina Chronicles: Settling In and Getting Out

Butler's Birds is now broadcasting definitively from Wayne County, North Carolina. After a much needed and much relished pause in the mountains, the last several weeks have been all about getting up and running at work and up and filing lost or damaged claims with the moving company (seriously, the worst). 
On the bright side, we have a proper yard now, which can start generating a proper yard list. Other than some fervent lawn mowing and ferocious weed-whacking, I have not been able to tend it and make it more birdacious, but all the same there have been a few good pulls.  

Between the generic sounding name and their generic use on logos, Blue Jays have little aura about them. To be fair, they are a quotidian yard bird as well, but they're still gorgeous and not often crushable, in my prior experiences.


The best yard bird(s) so far came under odd circumstances, with 3 Mississippi Kites waiting out a heavy morning shower in the large dead pine across the street. My understanding is that any bird seen from one's yard is still countable. Luckily these birds also flew directly through our airspace when departing, so, double good.

  

As well as the incidental yard birds, we've had some cool moths and 'phibs. The first one below, a Cecrophia Silk Moth I believe, was on its last legs. The Luna Moth, like all Luna Moths, was actually an extraterrestrial. The Fowler's Toad (?) lives by our garden hose. Most evenings I watch it hunt with great success.

                      

The main mission for local birding, other than upping the rookie county numbers, is to photograph Barred Owl well. True to form, last time I saw one at Cliffs of the Neuse it was flushed and didn't stick around. So too this time. Fortunately there were still vocal Prothonotaries around then, as now, to console and to covet.


Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Lake's Park: Into the Pines and Palms

The most bizarre and perplexing Florida habitat, for me, is the combination pine and palm forests. I don't know if these habitats are transplants, offspring from transplants/terraforming or just natural to the area, but seeing the two trees growing side by side is very strange. In Arizona, you don't really find pines naturally below 5,000 feet, and since palms don't grow here naturally, they're only ever in residential areas.
Anyway, there was a swathe of this interesting pine and palm mixture at the afore mentioned Lake's Park. While they didn't have roosting herons or Gallinules, I was still hurting from the fact that, after three days of birding, I had only found three warbler species. Where better for Pine and Palm Warblers to be that in a pine palm forest?


The dense foliage was perforated with dirt trails, most of which were overgrown/underused. There was plenty of nature noise, always an encouraging sign, but not a lot of visibility. One call was particularly repetitive. It was familiar, and yet unlike any call I could recognize. At this point in the trip, I had been surrounded by serenading Wrens and Cardinals enough to know their sounds, and this was different, though similar to the latter. Most excitingly, it was clearly coming from lower in the brush, so I might actually have a chance to see and photograph a non heron/egret bird on the trip. I still needed Brown Thrasher, and maybe it'd be a migrating Thrush or something else super cool!

With beads of sweat reaching critical mass and trailing down my face, I stalked and creeped with great skill (don't ask me how I became a skilled stalker/creeper) until I zeroed in on the vocalizing bird. I pushed down a palm frond, peered through an opening and...


FOILED! This doe-eyed immature Cardinal was practicing/butchering the Cardinal song. He'd thrown me for a loop. I'll admit, he's pretty darn cute, but Cardinal was not atop my list of Florida Must See birds. I couldn't spend too long sulking. A racket broke out in the canopy of nearby Slash Pine (?) trees, with three bellicose Blue Jays mobbing a raptor and robbing it of its perch.
You can see the raptor's tail feathers in the photo below. Any guesses???



After an hours of humid hiking I had little to show for my efforts, but the foray into the pines did allow for a brief photo shoot with a Blue Jay--perhaps one of the aggravated assault offenders from before--when it perched on a hand rail (many on the trails in Florida seem to be constructed with the pre-conceieved notion that everyone hiking them will fall and drown in the mud if there aren't handrails).


I must ashamedly admit, this is the first time I've photographed a Blue Jay. True enough, you won't see them in Arizona, but between Pennsylvania and four years in Dallas, well...there's no excuse, only recompense. It was a fun little detour, but at this point I had resigned myself to the reality that all the best birding and photography was to be done at the water's edge. That's where we'll head next.