American Coots creep out of lakes like creatures of the bog, drawing up mud with their lobed toes as they march, single file, from the water to their feeding grounds. I once watched hundreds emerge, one by one, from the low-tide flats at San Leandro Marina in California, forming a line of black baubles from…
Utility Pole Eagles
Back in the Bay Area, if someone had described to me a place where Bald Eagles huddled on every utility pole like pigeons or Starlings, I would have thought it must be Alaska … or somewhere along the Samuel Morse telegraph lines of the mid-1800s. I didn’t expect that just two hours north — through…
If You Build It, the Eagles Will Come
We barely saw this sub-adult Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), hunkered down and camouflaged, in a tree above the trail at Union Bay Natural Area. I shot a few frames right before the sun fell below Husky Stadium to the south. At full extension, the eagle was still quite small in the frame, and the aggressive…
Parrots Directing Traffic
As my life in California drifts farther behind me, I’m given to fits of sentimentality … especially for the wildlife and wilderness we left behind. Among my emotional favorites are the wild parrots of San Francisco — actually, Red-masked Parakeets or Cherry-headed Conures. These are the celebrity birds featured in Mark Bittner’s The Wild Parrots…
Crow Casting a Pellet [Almost]
Sometimes, if there are no birds or wild animals in the vicinity (which is often the case in the heavily-populated parks near my Seattle home) I’ll just sit and take in the scenery …. with camera ready in case something unexpected happens. In Seattle, I can almost always count on crows showing up, even if…
The Origins of Avian Blue
I pulled a few of my Western Bluebird pics from the archives to illustrate the following excerpt. This month’s Smithsonian Magazine has a short piece entitled Why So Blue? by Helen Fields, which explores the natural magic behind bluebird blue: [Ornithologist Richard Prum] discovered that as a blue feather grows, something amazing happens. Inside each…
On Double-Banded Knee
Seattle crows are among the most famous of modern crows, owing to studies by John Marzluff which are featured in A Murder of Crows. This PBS Nature episode looks at Marzluff’s University of Washington (UW) research projects and the crows’ ability to recognize and remember human faces. I’ve seen a few UW-banded crows around town,…
These Are Not Leaves
My loose homage to Rene Magritte. They were so quiet, fluttering in the wind just like the leaves. Not even the softest Starling whistle came from that tree. When you’ve birded or photographed enough, or sometimes even just a bit, it’s wonderful how the slightest anomaly then draws the eye. This was more than slight,…
When the Crane Calls
Sandhill Cranes have distinctive calls you recognize immediately, once you know them. They rattle, and croak and reverberate through the estuary. The first time you hear that sound, you’ll expect something magnificent, prehistoric, indefinable. And that’s precisely what you’ll encounter. Cranes have ancestry reaching into the Miocene Epoch, 24 to 5 million years ago. They…
Snowy Owls, Boundary Bay & Rethinking My Own Motivations
Snow Owls on driftwood, shot from the dike trail at Boundary Bay – ©ingridtaylar – Click for Larger Image My only intent in visiting Boundary Bay was to get a glimpse of Snowy Owls. I’ve never seen them in the wild, and although I brought my camera, I didn’t expect to be close enough to…
