Archive for birds

Floating with Kingfishers

// by timothyaaron // July 19th, 2009 // No Comments » // Everyday, birds

A friend and I decided to fish/float the first section of James River yesterday. We got kind of a late start (2pm), but it was less than 3 miles, so no big deal.

We dropped his car off at the our landing spot and car-pooled to the launch spot. We grabbed fishing poles, inner tubes and his car keys (I later regretted leaving my binoculars). We probably caught over 7 different kinds of fish: channel catfish, northern rock bass, spotted bass, green sunfish, bluegill, some carp and more … approximately  100 of them.  I still haven’t been able to identify one kind that we caught a lot of; it was longer and skinner than most of the other species.

I saw a variety of new birds, too. Most of which I couldn’t get close enough to identify without my binoculars; including what I’m guessing was a Little Blue Heron. I did manage to identify some of them: Muscovy Duck (a large ugly-faced black and white thing — a long way from home, which is supposedly Central America), a handful of Prothonotary Warblers (crazy bright yellow birds that let me swim within a few feet of them) and several Belted Kingfishers.

Possibly the most interesting part of the trip was realizing the sun was going down and we were nowhere near the end. We thought we were nearly done, but it turns out we had over a mile to go. We got to his car just before dark. Now all of this is no big deal except for one thing: we both have a wife and a baby, both of whom though we’d only be gone a few hours (and us with no way to contact them) … turned out to be just over 7 hours; we didn’t get back until after 9pm.

Oops.

Yellow-throated Vireo + 4

// by timothyaaron // July 11th, 2009 // No Comments » // birds

Eventful day today. Besides nearly losing a few fingers trying (and failing) to save a Common Snapping Turtle (was I supposed to know they could jump?) from the dangers of crossing the road, I identified 5 new birds today…some pretty cool ones, at that. Ended the night by taking the wife to a local rodeo. But enough about me, on to the birds…

Saw a Wild Turkey, with about a dozen babies, and a Great Blue Heron this morning (same place I saw the snapping turtle) on the way to a yard sale listing a canoe. (On a side note, he was asking $850 for the canoe! Ridiculous.) My favorite, obviously, was the Yellow-throated Vireo–found him at the little pond across the street. Then, this afternoon I spotted an Eastern Kingbird near the pond at Teen Challenge USA and my first Common Grackle on the way to the rodeo tonight.

That brings me to a total of 27 birds identified.

Oh yeah, want to set the record straight about those blackbirds. The most common is the European Starling. What I’ve been calling a Rusty Blackbird is, in fact, the Brewer’s Blackbird.

State bird + 3

// by timothyaaron // July 5th, 2009 // No Comments » // birds

Today we found the American Goldfinch, Brown-headed Cowbird, Eastern Bluebird (state bird), and European Starling.

What I thought was a Starling earlier I still can’t place.  For now I’m calling it a Rusty Blackbird, despite the fact that they’re supposed to be in Canada until winter and don’t have deep yellow eyes…they’re dark.  The weird thing is, it’s a very common bird…probably only the Robin is more common, at least in my yard.

I also cheated and added a bird we saw 3+ years ago at our wedding: Black-billed Magpie.  We liked it so much a picture of it is in the wedding section of Leah’s scrapbook.

That brings us to a total of 18.

Bird Watching

// by timothyaaron // July 4th, 2009 // No Comments » // birds

Excited about my new hobby. My beautiful wife bought me some really nice binoculars, Olympus Tracker, for Father’s Day and I bought iBird Explorer Plus, an amazing bird reference app, for my phone, yesterday.
In the last 2 weeks we’ve identified 12 birds; the most exciting probably being the Scissor-tailed Flycatcher.
There are 2 blackbirds I haven’t identified yet, I want to see them again before I say for sure–might be a European Starling and a Red-winged Blackbird.
The ones we know for sure are American Crow, American Robin, Black-capped Chickadee, Canada Goose, House Finch, Killdeer, Mallard, Mourning Dove, Northern Cardinal, Northern Mockingbird, Rock Pigeon, and Scissor-tailed Flycatcher.