Adele

Posts tagged with "birds"

Fox Behaviour Video

Sunday, 9. December 2007, 21:09:27

Yet another cold, cloudy and incredibly wet day. I haven't seen any foxes at all, but that's probably because I haven't been out much

Photo opportunities are sparse in weather like this. I'd much rather a snowy day with clear skies, but that doesn't seem to be on the horizon right now. Anyway, I took the opportunity to work on a special project. I've compiled various fox photos and video clips to make a movie illustrating a few fox facts and also looking their "language" I hope you enjoy it.

Direct link

It was quite interesting for me to look back through the old movies. The Old Dogfox was so prominent then, but the Survivor Vixen caught my attention more. Seeing her in terrible condition with mange was a second startling reminder of how effective proper treatment is for this disease. (The first was Words' recent post.) I was also reminded of her strange brush shape in the distant past, when her fur had only partly grown back. It looked like a real painting brush - a thin tail topped by the most enormous tip!

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I've also used this time to have another look at the close on 1,000 pictures I took in southern Alberta last June. Some got on here; others found their way into albums, but the majority never saw the light of day at all

So, six months later here are some more creatures of the great lone land.

Grasshopper sparrow (at least...North American sparrows are hard to ID with complete certainity)

Eastern kingbird

Western kingbird

White-tailed deer: you watch my back, I'll watch yours

Canadian tiger swallowtail

The wild grasslands are just so rich in life

27 comments

Quite the Charm

Saturday, 13. October 2007, 11:13:06

birds, APN, fungi, fox

I forget who wrote that "when one tugs at one thing in nature, one finds it attached to the rest of the world" but it is certainly an apt quote for this time of year, when interactions are so apparent.

It is not a coincidence that the fruiting bodies of fungi often appear under trees, like these:

Some fungi exist in a symbiotic relationships with tree roots, allowing the plant to obtain more essential minerals. It is a fair guess that the world would look a very different place without the helping hand of fungi.

Squirrels and jays dash back and forth gathering nuts to consume and cache. Foxes, too, seem to do their bit in spreading plant life around

I found no less than six heaps of fox scat on my walk this morning, and most of them were full of cherry stones. They also eat blackberries and rose hips.

Foxes have a curious habit of putting their scat on raised objects - be they molehills or rocks. This presumably is the fox's way of advertising that the territory is in use, although I've also seen them mark points of interest with scat.

Other creatures interacting on a grand scale comprise one of the biggest attractions of autumn to me - a big roving mixed finch flock is well worth many miles of carrying the Tamron about! This morning, I rounded a corner on a farm trail to encounter the astonishing sight of 100+ goldfinches, chaffinches, and greenfinches whistling, darting, and fluttering

This is maximum zoom and cropped. They did not wish to come too close to me and they are small targets for the camera! (To anyone not familar with goldfinches, their collective noun is a "charm"

)

I suspect there were some rarer species mixed in with the crowd but I didn't have the opportunity to scan it properly. With binoculars, I probably could have picked out a linnet or two, or some redpolls. It's a little early for our winter migrant finches (bramblings and siskins) to appear, but I certainly will be on the look out for them from now on.

I've also collected more shots for my APN album

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Back in the garden, I had more opportunities yesterday to struggle with low light conditions

This is a winter wren, the third smallest bird in the UK

Not a very good picture, I admit, but it was the best I could do for the conditions and photo opportunities for wrens don't come around for me very often.

And a grudging thanks to the Survivor Vixen for giving me a marginally better photo opportunity than last time

The One-Eyed Dogfox also came last night, but he wasn't so obliging. Perhaps the trail camera will be luckier with him...

11 comments

Southern Alberta Wildlife Album

Wednesday, 20. June 2007, 06:28:44

bear, alberta, birds

My wildlife photo album from southern Alberta (Waterton and Dinosaur, and the prairie in between) is finally online

Please have a look

I hope you will agree with me that the prairie, far from being monotonous, is one of the world's most special habitats and worthy of a big effort to return it to its former glory

Scenery will have to wait until tomorrow

It was originally my intention to combine all my Alberta pictures but the southern part of the province is so different from Banff and Jasper it makes more sense to have two sets of albums.

EDIT: The scenery album is here.

13 comments

Multiples

Wednesday, 13. June 2007, 04:19:58

birds, larks, prairie, blackbirds

One of the most obvious aspects about birding in the prairies (except for the sheer number of birds and the marvelous songs they all seem to sing) is that species appear to come in multiples. In the UK, a blackbird is a blackbird: we have one species. Alberta has four, including...

Brewer's blackbird

Redwinged blackbird

Yellow-headed blackbird

...and also the rusty blackbird, but I didn't detect / photograph one of those

I've already posted a picture of a meadowlark; here's another common prairie species, the horned lark.

But some Albertan species are more familiar to me

This is a waxwing, a much sought-after species in the UK, where it appears fairly randomly to eat berries in the winter.

It may not seem immediately logical that the prairies are teeming with waterbirds, but there's a good reason why it's called the "duck factory"

Saskatchewan and Alberta have multitudes of little grassland lakes known as potholes which attract countless numbers of birds. Including marbled godwits

Other birds? Well, I saw everything from a rufous hummingbirds to pelicans and a crane

Many different duck species, my first American avocet

a hopelessly confusing variety of native sparrows

a few northern flickers, warblers, and two species of wren which I have to confess that I'd never heard of prior to this trip

In any case I think I've just about caught up on the Alberta backlog now. I will be creating new albums but that will have to wait until I get my own computer back and can use my preferred software for resizing / processing again.

23 comments

The Unplain Plains

Monday, 11. June 2007, 17:13:46

fossils, canada, deer, birds ...

I don't know why the prairies have a reputation for being flat. They have plenty of rugged topography, but it works the other way around to most places. We are accustomed to looking up and seeing hills and mountains. In the plains, you look down to see coulees and badlands. Those little green dots down there are huge cottonwood trees!

This is the other-worldly landscape of Dinosaur Provincial Park, one of Alberta's most extraordinary corners. Like regular coulees, the badlands of the Red Deer River are invisible until you are almost on top of them, staring in amazement at the gaping hole that has suddenly opened up in the midst of lush prairie. I can well understand why early pioneers thought them "bad lands" to cross. But they are good lands to photograph

Eroded by water, ice and wind, the exposed valley has revealed arguably the most astonishing collection of fossils found anywere on earth. Something like 35 species of dinosaur and 150 complete skeletons have been found so far, and work still continues. This is a paleontologist's dreamscape

Though many dinosaurs have been shipped to museums around the world, a few are on display in the field centre museum. I forget what species this is

The prairie itself has taken one heck of a hammering over the past hundred years, especially the mammals. But it's still a great place to watch birds. Rephrase - it's an incredible place to watch birds

My raptor list alone included peregrine, red-tailed hawk, swainson's hawk, prairie falcon, bald eagle (admittedly, that was little higher up) American kestrel, merlin, and northern harrier (the hen harrier or skydancer of Europe).

This is a red-tailed hawk.

And, from a totally different genus

here is another favourite - Wilson's snipe. It makes a curious pulsating sound while flying as air rushes through its feathers.

Mammals have suffered much more than birds since the prairie was developed but I still caught a few glimpses of possibly the most beautifully prairie-fied creature of all, North America's fastest mammal and the last survivor of an extraordinary family that roamed the continent in ancient times. This is the pronghorn, unique in all the Earth.

It can sprint at 100kph and spot a wolf 5km away - something that is curious, since an adult pronghorn has no real predators. But this is the the ghost of predation past - adaptions to an ancient enemy which no longer exists. Long, long ago, pronghorns were hunted by American cheetahs (which died out, along with something like 80% of North American mammals, at the end of the last ice age). One can only assume the cheetah was faster still, in order to catch such a swift prey. The cat is gone; the pronghorn survives with somewhat redundant defences.

In Waterton and Dinosaur parks themselves, where wildlife is protected, I saw a great range of mammals and took a great number of pictures

but I've only got time for one more now.

There are two species of small deer here - whitetails and mule deer - and telling them apart is a bit of a pain for newcomers. I suppose I'd always wanted to get a picture like this to explain the difference

One of my most odd deer sightings ever, a whitetail and a mule deer fleeing hoof in hoof across the plains from some common foe, possibly a cougar lurking invisible in an aspen grove. The whitetail is the higher one in this photo. Note the difference in their rump markings...