Simon ponders the vastness of it all, the mysteries of infinity, and the unfathomable distance between meals.
by James Brush
Coyote Mercury Posts
I’ve heard it said that you should write what you know. I think it’s just as useful to write what you want to learn. That’s part of why I enjoy writing about my birding experiences.
The day before Thanksgiving I walked to the pond down the street to see what kinds of ducks were around. Mostly Gadwalls and some Northern Shovelers. I saw a Lesser Scaup too, or so I thought. Had I looked closer I would have seen that it wasn’t a Scaup, but rather something new to me.
I posted some pictures and Ted commented and pointed out the error I had made. I consulted my Sibley guide and found that while Lesser Scaup and Ring-necks are similar, there are differences such as the white ring on the Ring-neck’s bill and the white spur on his side. Also the scaup has a grey back while the Ring-neck’s back is black.
I went back and compared pictures from a few weeks ago with a Lesser Scaup picture from last year and saw the difference.
Since I had never seen a Ring-necked Duck before (at least while knowing what it was) I walked back down today to see if there were any still there.
It’s a cold day today, but there were actually more ducks than usual. I didn’t count, but I suspect there were 20 or so Gadwalls and at least 10 Ring-necked Ducks.
I watched for awhile and tried a few pictures, but it was dark and so I had trouble getting a stable shot. Still, this one was passable and now that I know the field marks well enough to distinguish Ring-necks from Scaup, I’m confident in adding this new bird to my life list.
And then there’s the beauty of writing what you want to learn. I think I’ve learned a good bit about birds just from writing about what I’m seeing and experiencing in the field. Or in my backyard as the case may be. But, it’s easy to get overconfident and not notice what should be obvious (ie: that wasn’t a Lesser Scaup) and so the writing and posting what I think I know helps me nail down what I do know and still need to learn. I still have a lot to learn about ducks, for instance, which I’m discovering are kind of tricky.
Soon, the cold started to get to me and it was time to head home and feed the pups, but as I was going I noticed a buck nibbling the grass on the far side of the pond.
Amazing what else you can see when going out to look for birds. Of course, seeing deer around here isn’t that amazing. Had I been awake the other night I would have seen the one that came to our front porch to eat our plants.
For more bird blogging, be sure to check out I and the Bird #90.
This was a busy weekend and so I only got to watch the feeders for a few minutes at a stretch, mostly as I was passing by the windows.
If squirrels were birds, I’d have a pretty high count this time, but since they’re not, I didn’t see very many and nothing unusual.
The count for Week 5:
- Carolina Wren (1)
- Carolina Chickadee (1)
- Black-crested Titmouse (1)
- Bewick’s Wren (1)
- White-winged Dove (1)
- Northern Cardinal (1)
- House Finch (2)
- House Sparrow (3)
- Chipping Sparrow (4)
The only noteworthy thing is that I finally saw the female cardinal again for the first time in months. She and the crippled Mr. Cardinal were foraging below the platform feeder earlier in the week, but, alas, I did not see her on my count days, the only cardinal then being Mr. Cardinal.
The weather was mostly overcast, warm and humid. A front came through last night so now it’s in the thirties.
I do love Texas weather.
For my birthday, my parents got me a wide angle lens. Joey was my first subject.
That’s his new soccer ball on the left.
I’d forgotten how much I love shooting wide angle.
Week 4 of Project FeederWatch brought a new bird into the mix: the Ladder-backed Woodpecker. This is the first one I’ve seen since July when they were fairly regular visitors to the yard.
Mr. Cardinal also returns after 2 weeks. He’s the only one I can identify as an individual, and that’s because of his injured leg. I first saw it back in June. It was twisted behind him at a painful looking angle. I didn’t expect to see him much longer after that, but he keeps coming back. It’s been 6 months now, and he’s hanging in there.
And, now for this week’s count:
- Chipping Sparrow (3)
- House Sparrow (20)
- Carolina Wren (2)
- Blue Jay (2)
- White-winged Dove (12)
- Black-crested Titmouse (2)
- Carolina Chickadee (2)
- Northern Cardinal (1)
- Bewick’s Wren (1)
- Ladder-backed Woodpecker (1)
That’s the second week in a row that I’ve only counted 3 Chipping Sparrows. I wonder if it’s the same three.
These are Gadwalls circling the little pond down the street.
The other day Mike from 10000 Birds left a comment here. What startled me was the fact that there was a picture of him next to his comment in my admin interface. How the devil did he do that? I thought.
I checked the image properties and found that it was served by gravatar.com, a site that allows you to upload a picture and associate it with an email address. Then whenever you use that address to log into a forum or blog that supports gravatars, your picture comes up by your name.
The latest WordPress versions support this, and so I studied the default theme and adjusted my comments.php file to show gravatars. A little CSS styling to tweak and there it was.
If you comment here, consider visiting gravatar.com and signing up for a gravatar, then leave a comment and your gravatar will appear alongside your comment.
If you don’t have one, WordPress will just generate a little pattern. I can also set it to display cartoon monsters for each commenter. Should I do that? Hopefully nobody would be offended.
Want to add gravatars to your WordPress theme? Here’s how:
Simply open your theme’s comments.php file and add the following code (the 40 gives the size of the image in pixels):
< ?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 40 ); ?>
Before this line (assuming your comments.php is based on the default theme):
< ?php comment_author_link() ?> says:
You’ll probably need to make a few adjustments to your CSS as well. I just lifted these lines from the default theme’s style.css and adjusted them to suit my theme:
.commentlist li .avatar {
float: right;
border: 1px solid #eee;
padding: 2px;
background: #fff;
}
Easy as can be.
For more, visit the WordPress codex.
It’s weird that I’ve walked past this drain on the way down to the pond countless times and never looked at it twice.
For whatever reason, last weekend it finally struck me that it’s actually kind of cool. The three blocks remind me of some kind of ancient structure, aligned for some unknown reason, and when captured in black-and-white, it somehow becomes mysterious and foreboding.
(By the way, click on the picture, or any of the pictures over the past two weeks. I’ve finally figured out how to show larger images on pages without sidebars.)
My dad called on Monday evening to say that my brother had called to tell him to check this cool alignment out.
I could see it to the west, above my house as I stood in the driveway. Venus is the one in the lower middle, and Jupiter is on the right. Through my binoculars, I could see the Galilean Moons.
I love when these kind of things happen out there. It’s a nice surprise to see these transitory patterns appear, forcing a second look. I wonder what, if anything, this might have signified in more primitive times.
In these times it is a nice reminder of the wonders one can see by doing nothing more difficult than looking up on a crisp autumn night.
Week 3 of Project FeederWatch was cool and overcast with occasional showers. It was a good weekend for staying in and staring out the windows.
The birds and the numbers:
- House Finch (1)
- House Sparrow (10)
- Blue Jay (2)
- Bewick’s Wren (1)
- Carolina Wren (2)
- White-winged Dove (17)
- Black-crested Titmouse (1)
- Chipping Sparrow (3)
- Carolina Chickadee (1)
I didn’t see our cardinal this weekend, but all the others have made appearances in my previous counts.
What’s really interesting to me is how the birds’ behavior has changed slightly since the summer. The Blue Jays, for instance, are no longer interested in the suet feeder. They hogged it all summer and now they’ve all but surrendered it to the wrens and chickadees.
They have not lost their taste for peanuts, though, and they swoop in, grab a nut and are gone before I know it.
Unless this guy is in the way…
I’m pretty sure there were more Chipping Sparrows, but they like to poke around behind the sage bush.
Bewick’s Wrens come each summer to nest in our boxes, but this time of year, I see more of their larger cousins, the Carolina Wrens.
