Birdwatching
 

Yesterday, I went for a bike ride and saw an awesome red-winged blackbird. For y'all that haven't seen one before, they look like this:



Are there any other birdwatchers out there? I usually make special trips to birdwatch a couple times a year. I'd like to go more, but I usually end up mixing it in with camping and fishing and so on.

I like a spot of birdwatching. Usually it's places quite local to me such as Thurtaston Country PArk and Bidston Hill. Also we get a lot of migrating coastal birds in the Dee estuary.

Sometimes in Chester we see a raven, which is great.

Sometimes there are special ferry cruises out into Liverpool bay for the purpose of birdwatching. On last September's we watched Arctic Terns, which was very nice.

WHen I see something intereseting from now on, I'll post in this thread.

Common-fairly common for us are: bullfinches, peregrine falsons, greenfinches, great tits, blue tits, moorhens, kestrels, woodpeckers and many more, especially wader types.

In our (small, urban) garden, we only get magpies, jays, blackbirds and a few others with any regularity.

Hip Priest, I bet there are lots of birds you see often that I have never seen.

I actually considered building a set-up with a mic and parabola for recording birds. I have a book (The Singing Life of Birds by Donald Kroodsma) that explains how to do it. Birdsong is really interesting. I am a huge nerd.

My pic of a Scarlet Tanager that I took in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park:

There are a lot of Killdeer around here now. I hear them squawking as I drive around. The little bastards will pretend to be injured if you go near their nests.

I'm just now about to get into the whole birdsong thing. I've been trying a bit, and I'm armed with some recordings to help me learn.

I live close to pockets of very accessible but under-used countryside, so there are decent populations of nice things. We're also furtunate to live close to two very different rivers - the industrial Mersey on one side and the protected Dee on the other. We get a lot of migratory birds here.

Arctic Terns; they are great to watch in flight, swooping and turning, harrasing the other birds.

I've only seen arctic terns on TV.

Well, right now I'm logging off to go for a walk around the West Kirby area, so there's a chance I'll see some waders.

I love spotting a cardinal when everything is blanketed in snow.

i just saw a fox walk through my garden.

although not a bird, it is still quite rare and wildlife related.

Fox...rare? Don't know about that. I used to see them around town quite a lot. Well, I saw what I'm sure was the same fox 3 times in Leicester (it had a limp). I was at a pedestrian crossing waiting for the green man and this fox came up and sat on the kerb and waited for the light with me. It was a bit weird. Then I saw it in the same area a couple of other times.

This a cool page from a book from 1650 called Musurgia Universalis by Athanasius Kircher:




The parrot is saying "hello" in Classical Greek.

That book is full of the coolest illustrations ever:

Look at this keyboard with the extra keys to make up for the retarded systems of tuning they had back then:

I plan to do some this summer since I get up at sunrise to go to work. The bike ride on the way there is beautiful because I pass waterfalls and rapids on a riverside bikepath, so I stop to watch the sunrise all the time and there's plenty of birds

it was quite rare for me, but perhaps not as rare as some other animals i suppose. thats only the second fox i have ever seen in my life.

i did see a kingfisher get a fish once which was pretty amazing and a pike grab another smaller fish but thats my wildlife story's over in the blink of an eye.

there's this composer, Olivier Messiaen, who used to sit and notate birds singing. - that's some ear i say! I think he incorporated several birdsongs into his music.

bird watching is boring..unles your talking about watching "birds" as in gals

Today we went on a trip into Liverpool bay, organised by the RSPB and Liverpool Museum. A very pleasant afternoon, with the following sightings (in order):

Sandwich Tern
Kittiwake
Common Gull
Lesser Black-Backed Gull
Greater Black-Backed Gull
Shag
Guillemot
Cormorant
Arctic Tern
Common Tern
Arctic Shua
Long-Tailed Skua
Red-Throated Diver
Great Crested Grebe
Herring Gull
Common Scoter
Bar-Tailed Godwit
Mediteranean Gull

(also some seals and porpoises, but they are obviously not birds)

when at down at the beach in Delaware, see and hear among other things

sea gulls,
green herons,
snowy egrets,
sand pipers,
orioles,
ospreys and pelicans out on the bay
and the humongous great blue heron

ha!

I birdwatch sometimes. My great aunt is a huge birdwatcher (the kind that can identify a bird by it's call). I have several birdbooks, and binoculars, so why not?

isn't a boobie a kind of bird?
i'm sorry, but that's about all i can contribute.

I have a great pair of tits.

That's the first time I've ever searched with the filtering on, so I hope you schmucks are happy.

well they're smaller now since i've lost weight for no reason that i can think of.
no less nice.

Oh aye? I may well do that. I was only really downloading that 'un because I have a cover of it. Ground Zero 'Plays Standards'. Arguably the best covers album made.

i have an explanation for it actually but i shouldn't say...

shhhhhh

I havenae got it on my hard drive. I don't remember if I told you, but I have very, very little of my record collection on the computer. To fiddly, I like real things.

I saw something like a pheasant in the city today, and as I walked up to it, I saw 2 lovely, bright bluejays. All 3 birds are fairly rare around here.

I had my camera with me, but it ran out of batteries before I could snatch a shot.

Anyway, it made me think of this thread, and I thought the story was worthy of a mention.

Birds are quite the beautiful things.

Seagulls are everywhere here. They love chips, or 'fries' for you yanks.

normally when people say chips now i just think of french fries anyway.
which are way better than what you all call crisps (and what we call chips), i might add.

We don't call anything 'crisps'. It's all chips. Hot chips for your fries, and just chips for packet chips. I've heard 'crisps' used on Aerican movies. Never heard an Australian call them that.

I saw a Kingfisher today on a telephone wire:







There are a lot of birds here right now. There are many waterfowl wintering on the lakes, including a big flock of White Pelicans, which you normally see at the ocean, I guess.

I recently read a book about the rediscovery, in Arkansas, of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, which was supposedly extinct. Louisiana is also a hot spot in the search, especially the Atchafalaya Basin, to which I live very near. It's an interesting story, if anybody's interested they have a lot of info and a video that proves it still exists HERE.

When I was a kid, I saw a Pileated Woodpecker in the forests where I grew up in Georgia and thought I had rediscovered the Ivory-Billed, but was, of course, wrong. They look very similar. I was a precocious little naturalist.

I live by the river so I see a lot of big Seagulls.

On the right is the Pileated, on the left, the Ivory-Billed.

We get Great Spotted Woodpeckers near us.