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Dynamic Habitats

Posted on May 11, 2016

Dynamic Habitats

I got a text the other day from my dad saying, “Hey if you can, bring your boots over so we can investigate the beaver pond.” Behind my parents home is a beautiful wetland system that sits right in the valley, with forested hillsides surrounding. What was once a stream has since been turned into a marsh thanks to the work of some busy beavers. With dams on either end of the marsh, the water has been held back and has created great habitat for many birds, amphibians and reptiles. The marsh is full of snapping and painted turtles, peepers that are so numerous that their peeps...

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Northern Parula

Posted on May 10, 2016

Northern Parula

Here we have the Northern Parula (Setophaga americana) as photographed while feeding this past Sunday morning after a busy night of migration. These little birds sound like zippers with a hard ending, or sometimes the “That’s all Folks!” song from Looney Tunes after several fast da and be notes. Those white eye crescents stand out from afar on a blue gray bird with a white belly featuring that bright yellow throat and upper chest with a reddish brown band. Northern Parulas are a gleaning species, snatching insects and spiders from tree branches and especially caterpillars...

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Black-and-white Warbler

Posted on May 10, 2016

Black-and-white Warbler

I finally took some good photos of Black-and-white Warblers (Mniotilta varia) over the last few days as the species is peaking as a migrant in the Northeast. These stunning little birds never stop moving…and they move like a nuthatch, creeping and crawling along branches, vines and tree trunks for various insects and spiders. This nonstop motion makes them a difficult clean capture as their photos often end up a little blurry. At least this guy – while still not paying me any attention – paused for a moment or two while searching for prey on Sunday morning. I found an even...

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Common Ravens

Posted on May 10, 2016

Common Ravens

Common Ravens (Corvus corax) are known to be incredible fliers, soaring high in the sky and almost floating among the clouds, drifting and banking and turning and flipping with an endless array of aerial acrobatics. If you spend enough time hawk watching you will undoubtedly see them looking like a sizable raptor until fanning out that tail, showing off that bill and letting you hone in on that all black body. I watched these two Common Ravens interacting from afar as they dropped in altitude over a few minutes, croaking out their calls and interacting in every aerial maneuver one could...

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Leucistic Yellow-rumped Warbler

Posted on May 9, 2016

Leucistic Yellow-rumped Warbler

Here is that unique Yellow-rumped Warbler which I mentioned in a previous post. Can you see what looks different about it? I noticed it naked eye while tracking various subjects in a loose flock through the trees last week including more Yellow-rumps, Black-and-white Warblers, Blue-headed Vireos, and Blue-gray Gnatcatchers. After I got my binoculars on it I realized this bird was partially leucistic, and I quickly raised my camera to snap off a record photo. Leucism in birds is when melanin pigments are produced at less than normal levels or in an unexpected pattern. In this case many of the...

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Cape May Warblers

Posted on May 8, 2016

Cape May Warblers

Today I had the best views of Cape May Warblers ever during easily the best day of spring migration so far this year. Birds that had been trapped in the Mid-Atlantic for a week or 10 days finally moved north with heavy migration occurring on southerly winds. New England and northern New York had poor migratory conditions still, stopping a lot of birds when they arrived, and some areas of fog and/or rain also helped locally. I thought these couple of shots were the best I would get, and I was happy enough… But they decided to stick around after the clouds cleared and show off, feeding...

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