A Spark Bird for Liam?

On New Year's Eve, Phoebe, Liam, and I were texting about remembering to notice our first bird of 2025 the next morning. Liam was already back in Columbus, but Phoebe and Oscar were still here with me in Whipple. Liam got very excited about going to an actual birding place on New Year's Day and trying to see a really cool bird. A birding co-worker had told him about Pickerington Ponds Metropark south of Columbus, which is the only place I've ever seen sandhill cranes in breeding season in Ohio. Oh, YES. Go there, Liam and Ayla! Go there!

(Sadly, they were not as well protected from cold on New Year's Day as they were the day before Thanksgiving, when we went to see cranes in Indiana! Didn't have me there with the giant duffel full of Michelin Man down parkas...)

I was at Pickerington Ponds in February, 2016, and it was fulla ducks and I'm almost sure the cranes were there as well. If you look hard you can see some ducks flying over this beautiful barn, a signature sight at the park.

So he and Ayla climbed in the car, innocent of binoculars or field guide, because they don't own either. I was of course writhing with frustration, but there was nothing I could do about it from two hours away. Believe me I was tempted to drive up with the right gear. My boy wants to bird? I am ON that like Bluebonnet!

I knew they'd have fun with the water and the open sky, and I figured they'd see something cool, binoculars or none.

It wasn't long before I got a call. "Ma? We're looking at some ducks with a white spot on the head. Do you know what they might be?"

Well, they could be several things, this time of year. Buffleheads. Goldeneyes, for two. Liam said he thought the white spot was behind the eye. OK, that narrows it down...

"Can you take even a horrible cellphone photo of them?"

I got these a few minutes later, just what I'd asked for.

Ayla had thought to bring a small astronomical telescope, hand-held, and she somehow held her phone up to its eyepiece and got...something. But in this one I could eke out enough to figure out what they were.

I studied the photos. "Am I seeing cocked tails here?"

"Yes!" Liam answered. "Their tails are cocked!"

I fired back with some shots of my Sibley guide, opened to the pages I knew had the answer.

When Liam realized the mystery birds were hooded mergansers, his excitement knew no bounds. "That's so COOL!!" he kept exclaiming. 

It IS so cool! I could have gone to Pickerington Ponds with Liam and Ayla, and shown them those mergansers through a proper telescope, and I'm sure they'd have been pleased. The whole difference was that he and Ayla found them themselves, had no idea what they were, were burning to know, and figured out how to get the information they needed to identify them. (call Ma).

I know damn well I was about three times as excited as they were. THIS!!

Phoebe was to drive up and have lunch with Liam on her way home with Oscar today, Jan. 5. So the second I hung up with Liam, I started making a birdwatcher's care package. First, of course, was a pair of 10 power Swarovski binoculars, one of my spares. (I find I carry the smaller, lighter 8 power).

I put a brand new bino bra on them, with a Zick-decorated leather shield.

Next was the field guide his dad and I had worked together on, with help from Phoebe's fourth-grade class focus group at Salem-Liberty Elementary. Why, that's Phoebe on the cover!

Bill wrote it, and I did many of the illustrations (My dear friend Mike DiGiorgio did lots of the western species). 

I also wrote the WOW facts.

I included a lens cleaning kit for the binoculars, with a lens cloth with my photo on it. Phoebe had found this red-morph screech-owl along the driveway when she was coming home from work around 9:30 one night when she was in high school. She came in the house, grabbed a flashlight, told me to get my big camera, and said she was going to show me something. 
She literally led me by the hand across the yard and just down the little hill in the driveway. She whispered that I'd have probably only one chance to take the shot. She flicked on the light, found the owl, shone it; I took the shot, and the owl flew away.

And the shot was perfect. We had no right whatsoever to get a good shot, but somehow we did. Angry bird! SUCH a great moment, captured forever, never to be repeated.

February 28, 2013, 9:28 PM.

Then I wrote a card to go along with it all. Now that's what you call home-cookin'.

I had to tell Liam how I'd been waiting for this moment for 25 years, and how excited I was that it was finally here. And that the perfect time to start birding is exactly when you start. 

I hope he'll remember that whenever he puts these old Swarovskis on. I hope he takes this moment forward in his life, and opens the door wider to the joy of birdwatching. Ayla, I'm counting on you to get him out in nature and noticing everything around him. You two can learn together. My mama's heart is full to bursting. 

If you're going to find a bird on your own, THIS is a mighty fine one to find. A spark bird for Liam? 

Time will tell. No pressure, darling boy. No pressure at allllll.....

                                    From the website of the Rosamund Gifford Zoo in Syracuse, NY.                                                                    

Isn't it lovely that the first bird Liam found on his own was this insanely cool little fish-catching                                                                   duck? May there be many more.

Ducks, Glorious Ducks

What a fine bird is the common goldeneye! This magnificent hen was preening her belly when I found her. 

The contortions and pivots, a delight to witness. Look at that tail. I'm counting 14 tail feathers. An oddity of diving duck tails is a variable number of tail feathers. Lots. Most birds have 12 tail feathers. Diving ducks have more. This is the kind of thing bird painters think about. How many, and why, and getting it right. We're always counting feathers.

What a tableau! From back left, greater scaup hen, bufflehead drake, bathing bufflehead hen, greater scaup hen, redhead drake and hen. I almost felt I was back in the Potholes in spring. Except that I was freezing my patootie off, and this was Dunkirk Harbor in New York.

Gotta love a drake redhead made of watered satin. This one looks like he'll return to the Potholes to breed in fine fettle!

The exercise became trying to capture the best ducks in one shot.

Greater scaup, redhead, hooded merganser.

This is my favorite, a redhead and two hoodies. Redheads aren't very large, but hooded mergansers are diminutive little ducks. I adore them--just one big graphic, they are, with their little dinosaurian snoots edged in toothlike lamellae.

I cropped that photo as above for my Facebook cover photo. But the uncropped version is cooler. Note the reflection of a floating herring gull at top.

The gulls are never far away, always assessing the ducks. Feeling OK? Come closer. Let Dr. Hegu take a look.

Now a little shoutout to Bill of the Birds, who has a birthday tomorrow. I will be guiding a birding trip in Costa Rica as you complete another trip around the sun. Happy birthday Bill. I'll wave the green starboard lamp as your ship passes in the night, bound for Argentina.

Bird Beauties of Viera

If you can't get a good photo of a great blue heron in Florida, there is something wrong with you. But you can get wonderful photos of all kinds of much scarcer and shyer birds at Viera Wetlands, and the photographers all know it.

A glossy ibis preens its coppery plumage.

You beautiful thing. For this birdwatcher, for decades, glossy ibis have been just dark shapes through a spotting scope, and now here you stand right before me, preening unconcernedly.

A drake hooded merganser hides in the rushes, yellow eye like a panic button.

He gathers his mate and out they glide, and I am too close to get them both in (I'm digiscoping with Bill of the Bird's Leica rig, and loving every second of it). For more on the equipment I rather inexpertly used for my closeups, go to Jeff Bouton's Leica Birding Blog.

White ibis are confiding and nice, and pretty much everywhere around Space Coast.

 But the limpkin is a specialty of Viera Wetlands, and this is where wonderful photographers like my friend Marie Read come to immortalize them. Just look at her gallery of a spectacular limpkin fight at Viera!

They were in a much more pacific state of mind when we visited, but the air still rang with their staccato calls. Limpkins, more closely related to cranes than to their lookalike ibis, specialize in eating apple snails, and the empty shells strewn on the shore attested to their efficiency. I love their Latin name: Aramus guaruna. The origin of Aramus is unknown, according to Ernest Choate's Dictionary of American Bird Names, but the Guaruna are a tribe inhabiting the Orinoco region of Venezuela. There are not many bird names in Choate's gem of a book whose origins are unknown, and I like the air of tropical and systematic mystery surrounding this strange and noisy bird. According to Whatbird.com, it's called "Limpkin" for its jerky, awkward flight, but the Internet is full of tautologies. Jury's out on that. I can attest that the limpkin's haunting, hollow, cackling call has much of the resonance of the sandhill crane's purr, and that's good enough for me. Here's "Inspirational Sheila's" brief video of a limpkin calling. I have to confess I hadn't really thought about the limpkin's crane affiliations, but the voice truly gives it away. Listen to this bird's putts and then the full-out cry.

It was good to see and hear this dusky little brother of the crane.

News flash! A palm warbler actually on a palm!!  a sabal, to be exact. I like this photo a lot. You can even see its shadow.

                                                                                   

A shoveler nearly in full breeding plumage. Most of them were looking tatty.  

A lady of the lake (tricolored heron) fishes the clear waters. Hard to believe they were in a shower or toilet at one point...

Sun has its myriad attractions, but the colors of tricolored herons really show nicely in overcast, as on this rainy first visit to Viera.

The once endangered wood stork, another success story for conservation. I really though I'd never be lucky enough to see one, so critically endangered were they when I was growing up. It seems Ol' Ironhead is everywhere now. How lovely to have a true stork in North America. Nyah nyah, Old World. We got one too

and ours has pink feet!

Spectacular birdie he is. I almost drove off the road on my first visit to Fort Meyers in the early 90's, when I saw a bunch of wood storks in a roadside ditch. While I was growing up, wood storks were quietly making a comeback in Florida, spreading through the Southeast. I hadn't known. And now they are a reasonably common sight.

So many things to celebrate! It is what it is, and much of it is good.

A Living Building

The Lab of Ornithology appears to me to have been designed around two major aesthetic concerns. First, the trove of bird art, like that in the Fuertes library and the Fisher’s Island panel, which have been beautifully integrated into the space. A second goal was to showcase the natural wonders in the wetlands just outside, visible through huge windows all around. It’s like the biggest blind you’ve ever seen.

Though my time was limited, I was determined to take in just a bit of the gorgeous swampy bit of Sapsucker Woods immediately around the building. It’s truly another world, quiet, laced with mulched paths, swarming with birds. Canada geese were living their lives, getting it on, preening


and making a general honking ruckus. One pair has claimed ownership of a part of the path near the bird feeder, and challenges passersby in a quiet way. I saw several toddlers try to pet this bird. Not recommended.Does this goose look intelligent to you? It does to me. There's really something going on in those eyes. It hisses and intimidates people who come too close. You don’t want a bite from that bony, serrated bill. There were a couple of geese with permanently injured wings, making a good living, mates by their side, at the pond. One bird acts as an unofficial greeter, hanging out right by the entry. It's neat to see birds the second you pull into the parking lot of the Lab.

Mallards kept bombing over and dropping in, and I played at photographing them, with some pretty cool results.As a young bird painter, I devoured a book called Prairie Wings, by Edgar M. Queeney. Using the rudimentary black-and-white equipment of the time, he captured amazing photos of ducks in flight. If only I could go back in time and hand Mr. Queeney my little Digital Rebel. What fun he'd have.
A mushmouse swam by a resting hooded merganser (the white spot directly back of the rat).

A pair of common mergansers. When they hauled out on a log, I could see the bulk of their bodies. They’re like icebergs. Note the wood duck nesting boxes, which common and hooded mergansers may also use. The place is set up for birds, and the resident geese know and exploit that.

I had to chuckle when the black-capped chickadee I photographed turned out, on closer inspection, to be color-banded. This is the Lab of Ornithology, after all. Who knows what secrets these birds have revealed?

The incandescent glow of a mallard’s head. His mate hides in shadow.

I was stunned to see a big brown bat flying in daylight, dipping down to drink. I never thought my photos would be acceptable, but they aren’t bad, considering that I was focusing manually, and the bat was dipping and diving like, well, a bat. This is a really neat shot, and it's even, finally, in good focus.
I hoped he wasn’t ill; bats all over the Northeast are turning up with “white-nose syndrome,” a disease of apparently fungal origin that is killing them by the thousands, and sending them out of their hibernacula much too early. Please be well and travel safely, brown bat.
This ends my sojurn at the Lab. The "Letters from Eden" show hangs through mid-July. Please check it out if you're in the area.