I have recently returned from a trip to South Africa and specifically Cape Town, an exciting and interesting place for all sorts of reasons. The wildlife opportunities are immense and varied with a vast variety of birdlife. One bird that I found interesting and very approachable was the Cape Spurfowl or Cape Francolin Pternistis capensis. […]
Yup, I’ve never really been into listing birds. Certainly I keep track of the birds I see on bird walks and outings and report sightings on eBird, but I never kept a yard list , county list, state list, or even a life list. To tell you the truth, I don’t know how many birds […]
First of all a Happy New Year to all my readers!We were away for quite a while this holiday period and I was in need of some birding at my local patch, La Janda. Every month of the year there is continual migration through our area and change is apparent almost on a weekly basis.The […]
It’s really important to learn bird behavior if you want to get good bird photographs (click on photos for full sized images). I saw a post on Facebook the other day questioning “whether you can be a “birder” with a camera rather than with binoculars.” There were some pretty interesting remarks to this question and, […]
The Eurasian Woodcock is a resident breeder in northern Japan, but migrates south in winter to my region. Usually only observed during the night, I spotted this pair on Mount Unzen just after sunset feeding on worms and grubs. Luckily I had the 1D X, as I doubt if any other Canon camera could have […]
Grab forty winks. Saw logs. For a species that’s habitually short on shut-eye, we humans sure have come up with myriad ways to talk about it. We also spend a lot of time and money studying sleep, or the lack thereof. Yet, in spite of decades of inquiry, researchers still don’t have a good fix […]
What I love about winter in New England is that the pond start to freeze up and it concentrates the ducks and other birds into smaller areas that have open water. At a local pond in Plymouth Massachusetts, it becomes much easier to photograph and observe hooded mergansers. I was able to observe and photograph […]
Happy New Year to everyone and to all you birders out there I hope you’re 2013 year list has got off to a good start. Mine is so abysmally average I’m not even going to let on! Struggled to get out what with one thing and another … weather mainly, but I did get out […]