Grebes!

I have recently (as in about 15 min. ago) learned the art of zooming and cropping in my free photo editing software and therefore seem to be able to upload pictures in a timely manner again. Yay!

I went down to Montrose Harbor today to see the Grebes that I had heard about on the IL Birders Forum and I was not disappointed. I spent forever taking pictures of them, and forever whittling down which ones to upload, but I'm proud to say that I didn't have to download ANY pictures this time off the web to show you what any of the birds look like. These are all my own pictures!

So here we have a male Horned Grebe. I have a picture later which better illustrates why they're called horned. Isn't he pretty? They have a red eye (this is their breeding plumage, non-breeding is grey and white), white tip on their bill, and of course the gold behind the eyes.

Here is what I suspect is a juvenile male. He's too pale to be a breeding male (or maybe he's just not all the way into his breeding plumage) and it took me a long time to try and figure out what was going on with this guy. If you blow up the picture, you'll also note he looks kind of scruffy, which would indicate that he's molting, so it may not be a juvenile, just a male still getting into breeding plumage. This is by far my favorite picture of the bunch! So cool! These guys must be awesome fishers because I saw at least 3 chowing down on fish just while I was watching.

Here's a female Horned Grebe. She has a little of the gold color on her head and neck, but she's mostly gray and white with a red eye.

I was shooting into the sun for this one so it's a little dark, but you can see how the gold feathers on his head stick up a little bit and look like horns.


There were a whole bunch of Red-breasted Mergansers way out on the water, but the only reason I posted this picture, was so I could post the next one.

Action shot!

Actually, I have at least 4 pictures of empty or splashing water where I took the picture just as the ducks went underwater, so I was terribly proud that I got this one in action.

Here is an American Coot. I posted on them last fall and went into some detail about their feet and how they're actually Rails, not ducks. Well, you can see his weird, big toes in this shot. For some reason I couldn't get a great shot of him, although I have a good one of him swimming away from me.

At the end of the day I went over to a little pond on the golf course because I thought I saw a Coot on the pond. Then I thought it was a Ring-necked duck (which I saw a few weeks ago but haven't posted on yet), then I finally realized that it was a female Scaup. The white on the face threw me off.

I also hung around the hedge a bit and got this really good shot of a Fox Sparrow. They spend a lot of time on the ground, so I was lucky to get this shot of him up in the tree before he flew away.

Oh, and I harassed a poor squirrel. It's just so much easier to take pictures of squirrels than birds. They can't fly.
That's all for now. I'll try and post more pictures later :)

New Camera

Izzie got to be the first one to model for the new camera :) I'll post more pics later once I figure out how to upload them - right now I can only upload one at a time and it takes a few minutes. You can look forward to a duck quiz (I saw 4 new species 2 weeks ago).

Spring is coming!!!

So I went birdwatching last weekend and, you guys, spring is coming!! I've been seeing so many new birds!!! On Saturday I walked around the Point (the very mushy, melted snow saturated point) and ruined a pair of jeans in the process. (It's ok, I was going to give them away anyway, now they're going in the trash). Most of the winter I walk through the hedge area to get to the beach and it's just dead silent. Now it's very, very loud with very talkative birds :) Yay!!! I saw a Hairy Woodpecker, who was just not shy at all (saw him on Sunday too). I was probably within 3 or 4 feet of him freely moving around and he could've cared less. Previously in the day I tried walking along the harbor wall, but it was too muddy, but that's where the Mallard picture came from. They were all walking along the ice, but the ice was melting and was very very slick, so they kept slipping. It's very funny to watch Ducks slip and slide on ice. I'm not sure why. It's not like Ducks are particularly dignified creatures in the first place, it's just funny. I have video that I might post later, although it's not very good. But I took a picture of the male Mallard and posted it just to show you how ridiculously bright orange his legs are. Spring is so fun - all the colors on all the birds are just so bright! The cardinals are ridiculously red, and the red breast on the Robins is beautiful! Then I went down the pier and walked all the way to the end (which bends around to look like hook - hence the name Fishhook Pier) and I heard this weird sound. On the inner edge of the pier is a juvenile cormorant just hanging out. He was trying to dry his wings, I guess. I picked my favorite picture - blow up the picture and you can see his turquoise eye! Also his gape (the skin around his beak) is very yellow. Shorebirds like that (the egrets, herons, pelicans, cormorants, etc.) all get different colored skin around their mouths in the spring when they are breeding (some go red or green as well as yellow). So the yellow gape and turquoise eye are because it's spring. I was worried that he was sick because it seemed like he was coughing or sneezing, and it seemed odd that he was so close to us, although out of reach, and not reacting to us at all (us being me and the other people on the pier). But I went back the next day to check on him and he was gone, so he may have just been taking a pit stop. While I was checking him out, another couple came up and I got to expound on Cormorants and the other ducks (Goldeneyes, Scaups, and Mergansers) that were at the end of the pier. I thoroughly enjoyed that :) Just so happens that me and Nikki were trying to identify some Cormorants (Shags, actually) that she had photographed in Trieste, so I had spent a lot of time on wikipedia the day before researching them. So I sounded super smart :) They were terribly nice and I let them use my binoculars to look at the cormorant and goldeneyes. So at the end of the pier, I'm pretty sure I saw a pair of Redheaded Ducks fly out. I'll check out North Pond this weekend and see if I can get some pictures of some of them that are supposed to be there. Then on Sunday I went back to the Hedge and it was just alive with bird calls. There were Grackles (which had the most beautiful purple head), Starlings, Red-Winged Blackbirds (loud, loud birds), Cardinals, Robins, the Hairy Woodpecker again, and I also saw a Sandhill Crane fly overhead and a Killdeer came swooping in. Killdeer are loud. I chased him down and flushed him out twice to get a positive ID. In order to identify them, you want to make sure that there are 2 rings around their neck (not one) and as they are flying away they have kind of a light-orange tail which is, I think, diagnostic. They also have white lenth-wise stripes on the tops of their wings which are very easy to see in flight, but that's not diagnostic because lots of shorebirds have that for some reason.


Here's my cormorant (Juvenile, Double-Crested)

Mr. Clumsy Duck

And a picture (that I didn't take) of a Killdeer flying away so you can see the orange tail. And also the white stripes that run lengthwise down the wing that you can see when they're flying.

And here you can see the two black stripes on their neck.

Next week: I got my new camera this week and I'm going to take it for a test run this weekend sometime - hopefully it'll be sunny!