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Any birders? Share your photos!
- Thread starter altagirl
- Start date
MissySki
Angel Diva
I'm so glad I noted this here last year! I was trying to remember when I need to get feeders ready and couldn't remember exactly when they showed up. Looks like they will go out in ~2-3 weeks, yay! I was surely hallucinating yesterday, I thought I saw one out of the corner of my eye hovering around the seed feeder out front (which is in place of the hummingbird feeder this winter). I can't imagine there's be that early of an arrival though right??
fgor
Ski Diva Extraordinaire
YES! I love gulls. They are an underappreciated, weird and ornery birdI've been on a kick taking "gull appreciation" photos.
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These are fantastic photos too.To carry on the gull appreciation, here's an older gull photo I took which is still one of my favourites!
Christy
Angel Diva
Here on the other hand, they seem to have moved on from my feeders now that flowers are blooming. I'm only seeing one once or twice a day now!
YES! I love gulls. They are an underappreciated, weird and ornery bird
To carry on the gull appreciation, here's an older gull photo I took which is still one of my favourites!
OH - I love that! They really are characters. I think for me, realizing how long-lived many of them are really adds to that sense of character too. I often watch them and wonder if they learn to specialize over the years. When I'm out at our wetlands, there will be mud flats with thousands of gulls walking around picking through the mud (and watching them catch brine flies out along the shores of the Great Salt Lake is hilarious and amazing). But down at the one pond where the Pied-Billed Grebes hang out fishing, there will be usually less than half a dozen gulls flying around stalking the grebes to try and steal the fish that they catch. And I spend way too much time wondering if it's the same gulls who are fish thieves every time, and it's kind of their "specialty". Maybe the ones at the McDonalds parking lot specialize in french fries... I mean - if you live 20-29 years, you certainly have time to become a specialist or have a preference about your food sources and it's only natural to keep at somthing you like!
Here are some lovely Sandhill Cranes from 2 weeks ago. And a long-tailed weasel I spotted while out birding. It was the wildest thing - I had stepped out of my car to take some photos of a kestrel eating a mouse on top of a phone pole when I saw the weasel dart into the road about a hundred yards away from me. I frantically shot some photos as it ran towards me along the road edge, when a car passed by and it darted into the weeds. But when it was quiet again, it ran out, crossed the street and ducked into the weeds on the other side. I walked over slowly and looked and looked where I last saw movement and finally saw just it's little head sticking out of the weeds. It watched me watching it for a good 10 minutes, but didn't move, even if I got fairly close. I finally heard a vole shuffling around in the dry grass and getting closer and it shot out of the weeds and grabbed it in a split second. I watched it running down the road with it's prize, with one quick dart in the weeds. As I walked down the road I noticed a dead vole right on the side of the road and was utterly confused. Turns out that quick dart in the weeds was to kill and take ANOTHER vole, run that out to it's burrow and then come back and get the one it left on the road. So, so fun and utterly crazy to watch. 
Tennessee
Angel Diva
Love the long tailed weasel photos! We don’t have them here and I’ve never seen one. Such cute faces and long bodies! So, I had to look up their details (Wikipedia) and it was very interesting. Sounds like this one might have been caching food (2 voles at once!) maybe to feed babies? Thanks for the photos. I’ve never seen Sandhills Cranes either but they do pass through TN, I believe, on their migration.
I had wondered that myself - it seems MAYBE a little early for that, but they are at low elevation (for here) so they could have babies already. They're surprisingly versatile here - I've seen them up at Alta in the snow (their winter coats are solid white with just the black tip of the tail), but mostly down in the wetland areas. And they can catch huge prey - up to significantly larger than their body size. But when you watch them move, they are so flexible, almost noodly... it seems crazy that they are so strong! And probably unsurprisingly, they are crazy fast.
These photos are a little far away and cropped, but it's fun seeing the upright body position and the "hoverweasel". Hahaha. I also love this transition coat and how there's a heart on the back of it's head as the brown summer fur comes in.
Attachments
newboots
Angel Diva
These photos are just amazing! I am continually impressed with your ability to make professional quality photographs of hard-to-find wildlife! The weasel is adorable (although as a chicken keeper, I have had to take extraordinary efforts to prevent them from access to the coop). The gulls are wonderful - so nice to get a close-up look and appreciate them in their quirkiness. I was recently in a very large parking lot and 100+ gulls were resting, spaced apart from each other, all over the far end of the lot. They were still, and looked like an art installation! It took me a few moments to realize what they were. (I'm near the Hudson River now, and we rarely saw gulls in Vermont!)
Thank you so much! My parents raise chickens and he said the same thing about the weasel photos - they can really be a disaster in a chicken coop and squeeze in through the tiniest openings and they are always making sure things are sealed up tight to keep them out.
There is a bit in the intro to the Gull ID book I bought recently where he talks about a reporter asking him about the "gull problem", which the reporter defined as the pizza and french fry stealing on boardwalks. It's not a gull problem, it's that stealing food from other animals is right out of the gull playbook and humans are TERRIBLE about guarding their lunch. We just make the easiest targets. 
So pics below - a grebe holding it's catch and a split second later a gull was in that spot (the grebe dove and escaped with it's prize). And then a successful steal below that. Luckily the grebes are really good at catching fish and it doesn't seem to hurt them any to lose a few.
So pics below - a grebe holding it's catch and a split second later a gull was in that spot (the grebe dove and escaped with it's prize). And then a successful steal below that. Luckily the grebes are really good at catching fish and it doesn't seem to hurt them any to lose a few.
YES! I love gulls. They are an underappreciated, weird and ornery bird
To carry on the gull appreciation, here's an older gull photo I took which is still one of my favourites!
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@fgor - so is this a "Black-back" or "Kelp Gull"? My book just is geared towards North American species, but has a little section on "Dark Horse (Rare and Unlikely Gulls)" (haha, for this area anyway) with just a bit of ID information. The grayish green legs and bill shape/color seem right. My quick Google says that would be common in New Zealand:
"The southern black-backed gull (or ‘black-back’) is one of the most abundant and familiar large birds in New Zealand, although many people do not realise that the mottled brown juveniles (mistakenly called “mollyhawks”) are the same species as the immaculate adults. Found on or over all non-forested habitats from coastal waters to high-country farms, this is the only large gull found in New Zealand. They are particularly abundant at landfills, around ports and at fish-processing plants.
Known widely as ‘kelp gull’ in other countries, the same species is also common in similar latitudes around the southern hemisphere, including southern Australia, South America, southern Africa, and most subantarctic and peri-Antarctic islands, and the Antarctic Peninsula."
From Southern black-backed gull | New Zealand Birds Online (nzbirdsonline.org.nz)
fgor
Ski Diva Extraordinaire
Yes! Good identifying, we call them black back gulls
We have two common types of gull here, the big black backs and the smaller red billed gulls. They don't like each other much so you don't tend to see them together!A bunch of red billed gulls:
Evening red billed gull:
A black backed gull diving for and eating some dinner!
And I spotted some of these guys while on a weekend holiday in a small inland town. They were slightly smaller and shyer than the usual red bill gulls, which caught my attention. This is a black billed gull (yes, we're very imaginative with our gull names!!), apparently the most endangered gull in the world
fgor
Ski Diva Extraordinaire
Yes, they are!
I had actually driven there (Lake Tekapo) that weekend specifically because I knew the lupines were in flower and I wanted to see them.
And, to bring it back to birds
