Ozzie memories - Summer 2008

Australian White Ibis Threskiornis moluccus

male Australian Wood Duck Chenonetta jubata

female Australian Wood Duck Chenonetta jubata

male Chestnut Teal Anas castanea

female Chestnut Teal Anas castanea

Masked Lapwing Vanellus miles

Australian Magpie Cracticus tibicen

Australian Magpie Cracticus tibicen

Silver Gull Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae

Crested Pigeon Ocyphaps lophotes

Common Myna Acridotheres tristis

Noisy Miner Manorina melanocephala

  Slow bird week, I've been busy. I'll have to get out there soon though, spring is knocking. The Red-winged Blackbirds are back, along with the gulls. Funny, in Korea, winter is when the gulls come back in force.
  So here are a few pics from my memorable trip to Australia in May-August of 2008. It was glorious! The first installment is stuff from the Royal Botanical Gardens in Sydney. Strewth!

Île-de-la-Visitation, March 9th

House Finch Haemorhous mexicanus

Pigeon! Pigeon!

  It was a super sunny and warm day to join a BPQ field trip. Always good to compare notes with other birders. Pretty quiet day overall. Spring soon! Oh, I saw a squirrel with no tail, and it was hideous.

In search of Snowies - St-Hubert, March 4th

Snow Bunting - unmistakable pied wings

Snow Bunting

Snow Bunting

Horned Lark (female)

Horned Lark (male)

Roadside Snow Buntings

Lost in suburban hell

Snow Bunting / Horned Lark location

  Dan and I decided to have a nosy round St-Hubert airport to scope for Snowy Owls today. We hallucinated quite a few Snowies made of actual snow, then proceeded to get lost in suburbia hell. After finally making it back to the fields around the airport, we spotted a bird flying low across a farmer's field. The wings flashed a bold pied pattern and Dan quickly had it tagged as a Snow Bunting. We eventually encountered a roving flock of 24, and got great long views of them as they flew back and forth between the fields, a large dirt pile, and the gravel at the side of the road. After looking at a few field guides, I'm going to guess that most of them were adults in the process of assuming breeding plumage (darker blackish backs/very little breast banding, while retaining brownish on the head and yellow bills).
  These were soon joined by a few more small 'ground running' birds that turned out to be Horned Larks. We counted about a dozen.
  The other bird of note was a large Rough-legged Hawk patrolling near the Armed Forces choppers. It was not a great day weather/light-wise and we didn't get our owl, but we both got a pretty big kick out of prolonged views of birds we don't have much experience with.
  One of these days I'll get a proper picture editing program and learn how to edit pics properly.

The Forest Rangers - 'The Bird Watchers'

  I used to watch repeats of this nutty old show back in the day. The birdwatchers in this episode are tangental to the silly Hardy Boys-esque backwoods tale of intrigue. Still, it's fun and cringe-worthy watching the stodgy British birder do his thing.

Click here to watch the episode

Morgan Arboretum, February 23rd, 2013

Picking through the Redpolls

Red-bellied Woodpecker Melanerpes carolinus

Mourning Dove Zenaida macroura

  It was a snowy and warm Saturday, with plenty of dog walkers on the trails. We finally spotted an unmistakeable Hoary Redpoll mixed in with the Common Redpoll near the main lodge. Another highlight was long looks at a Red-bellied Woodpecker, this time a male. Nothing owly to report.

Bouncing the Dee

Then

Now 

  Dan and I have been feeding Chickadees at the Arbo since we were wee tots. We checked out the arbo last Saturday, and I decided to test how long a Chickadee would tolerate me bouncing my hand around for. Five seconds is the answer.

White-eye eye

  I was sorting through some old pics and came across the pic of a Japanese White-eye (Zosterops japonicus known as Warbling White-eye as of 2019) that graces the top of this page. I took it at Seogwipo's KAL Hotel way back in January 2009, and the neat thing is that if you look closely in its eye you can see the hotel, sky, and manicured lawn reflected! 
  Slow bird week. Oh, I went to the Arbo on Saturday, I'll put up a post about that.

'Bad' birds pics/The first digi-scoping ever?

Osprey Pandion haliaetus, viewed through comic-book-camera+spotting scope, Lasalle Quebec, 1988

Osprey pic comments

Tiger Shrike Lanius tigrinus viewed through cellcam+spotting scope, Geoje 2012

  Looking at Dan's creepily bad cellphone pic of the Barred Owl (or is it The Mothman?), I was reminded of a picture I took wayyyy back in 1988 while on a PQSPB trip in Lasalle. Everyone was looking at a distant Osprey though a spotting scope, and I asked if I could take a picture of it by putting my mini 'comic-book' camera up to the scope. Everyone scoffed, but I went ahead and clumsily fitted the tiny camera to the eyepiece and clicked. When the picture came back, I was shocked to see it had actually come out. My first bird picture - caveman digiscoping! I recently saw that pic again, in Dan's old bird diary. The old and more recent comments crack me up.
  Last year, in a nod to that incident, I held my cellphone camera up to JP's scope to get a picture of a ripping Tiger Shrike on Geoje, just for giggles.
  Incidentally, I got that mini camera by saving Bazooka Joe comics, not out of a comic book.

McGill ghetto Barred Owl

  Dan spotted this Barred Owl last night in the McGill ghetto and got a bad cellphone pic of it.

"It swooped over the car. I let out a high-pitch squeal, stopped the car and jumped out, n' ID'd it with binos. I don't think my bandmates ever saw me get so excited over something."

'Interesting Gulls' at Point aux Prairies

Glaucous Gull Larus hyperboreus top left, Iceland Gull Larus glaucoides in the water. Note the size difference and head structure

  As Dan and I were leaving the Point aux Prairies Park yesterday we spotted a large raft of about 300 mixed gulls, largely Great Black-backed. We quickly noticed several large whitish gulls mixed in, and set about trying to figure out what they were. I felt they were Glaucous Gull, due to size, forehead slope, and sneaky expression. Dan was leaning towards Iceland Gull, based on a smaller individual with a rounded, smaller head. It looks like we're both right! Try to figure out which is which - hours of fun for the whole family! Thanks Ken Thorpe for the help (and for the redpoll tips).