My first wild encounter with a Barred Owl in Seattle culminated in the photo below. Based on this experience, my advice to children in raptor territory is: avoid wearing plush toy animals on your backpack as the dusk hunting hour approaches. A boy was walking along a wooded path with his mother, a fuzzy toy…
Teaching the Kids to Forage
Juvenile gulls are as determined to get free food from their parents– as their parents are to wean them from the freebies. I’ve seen many adult gulls swimming or flapping away from their begging youngsters, forcing the juvies to forage on their own. I haven’t often watched a parent gull patiently teach the babies to…
Things I’d Never Seen ….
As little as I’ve been out in the field with my camera lately (relative to how it used to be), I’ve had a disproportionate number of firsts in terms of wildlife viewings. Some of it is my change of environment and the newness of Seattle and its wild offspring. And some of it is, well…
And Osprey Makes Two
So far, that’s all I’ve seen at this nesting site . . . two diligent Osprey, bringing each other fish and taking turns sitting. The structure of the cell phone tower obscures the interior of the nest, so I see only what happens on the rafters outside. To date, it’s been just a male and…
Eagle & Crow
There’s no lack of courage among the black birds. (Exhibit B: the eagle/crow face off I photographed last October.) I joke that Bald Eagles in Seattle are never without a personal entourage, usually crows and gulls. In this particular altercation, a Red-winged Blackbird joined the squadron as the eagle flew over Union Bay Natural Area…
Cleaning House
Much-maligned but still loved by me, a European Starling makes the drop: grubs for breakfast, in the door; baby droppings out the door. The parent carries the nestlings’ waste out through the portal, drops it in the shrubs nearby, then forages again in the grass for the babies’ next meal of insects. Because Starlings, en…
The Turns of Terns
I’ve described terns, with their distinct calls, as aerial barflies with too much whiskey and smoke on the voice box. Each tern is raspy in its own way, and Caspian Terns have a sharp croak that pierces the air over my balcony. They’re huddled on a warehouse rooftop one minute, hundreds of them, blurred by…
No Dropped Calls
This Osprey doesn’t have to worry about mobile phone dead zones at home — nesting, as he is, at the top of a cell tower. Osprey love the tall platforms of human invention, but the settings can take their toll, too — in the form of power outages, or even electrical harm to the birds….
Anatomy of a Cormorant Landing
Double-crested Cormorant – Phalacrocorax auritus. Photographed with my Olympus E-3 and Zuiko 70-300mm. The birds were silhouetted in late afternoon light, high ISO 1000, some post-processing NR to compensate for the darker conditions.. I shot this series along the Lake Washington Ship Canal in Seattle. If you’ve watched Double-crested Cormorants [literally] coming home to roost,…
Dating, Bufflehead Style
I wish I’d been closer than the far reach of my lens, struggling for focus in the thick of weather. I snapped these from the shore, capturing the distant dynamics of a Bufflehead courtship ritual. Two males were vying for the one female pictured here.
