Bryan's Posts About Birds
The Crazy Stuff Birds Eat
For many of us who watch their behavior, birds are what they eat — or at least are predictable in their diets: Kingfishers catch fish. Hummingbirds drink nectar. Robins eat earthworms. Flycatchers catch flies. Except when they don’t.
A Pre-Blizzard Snow Storm (of Geese)
Before the snow falls here in the Northeast, I offer you video of a blizzard of Snow Geese and Ross’s Geese taking off at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in central New Mexico earlier this month.
Better Know A Duck: Northern Pintail
CAN WE REALLY KNOW A DUCK? Ducks are so … out there. Yeah, out on the water, far away from us. But ducks are “out there” in other ways. First, they’re courting now. In the cold. And when they finally breed in spring, well, it’s kinda violent and twisted. And after the female lays eggs, the males blows town. Gone. Deadbeat dad. But you gotta love Northern Pintail.
A Golden Eagle Giving Me the “Eagle-Eye”
Good thing I’m not a jackrabbit or a gopher. Although they are capable of taking larger prey — including bighorn sheep, coyotes, or Sandhill Cranes — Golden Eagles specialize in small and medium-sized mammals.
Desert Snow
To my winter-deprived friends in the north, many of whom are now suffering rain or freezing rain, come to the desert. I offer you 10 images of birds and trees and farm buildings after a desert snowfall.
Start Your Year with a Snowy Owl
Happy New Year. Now go find a Snowy Owl. I’ll guide you there with an interactive map of Snowy Owl sightings since December 1.
A Triple (Treble) Bird Score
I have seen a Virginia Rail in Virginia, an Arctic Tern in the Arctic, a Mangrove Cuckoo in a mangrove…. You get the idea. But then there’s this woodpecker here in New Mexico — the source of my treble (not trouble).
Hot Birds in Vermont
Here are a couple birds you don’t see every winter in Vermont: Baltimore Oriole and Harlequin Duck. And since I’m far away from both those birds, I’ll offer a bonus shot of a Mexican Jay.
Wing Prints
With all the early snow in the U.S. this winter, birds have been making impressions – literally. We’re seeing various wing prints in the snow. It makes me wonder about the reliability of identifying these prints.
The Pulse of Ten Thousand Wings
Tens of thousands of Snow Geese and Sandhill Cranes can change your life for good. Here’s my next dispatch from Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in south central New Mexico.
Barred Before Bosque
Before I left Vermont for New Mexico, a few Barred Owls came visiting by email. Kerry and Linda Hurd, fittingly, encountered this Barred Owl above while attending the beautiful memorial celebration of Bob Spear’s life at his Birds of Vermont Museum in…
On the Road with Cranes and Geese
My apologies for the scarcity of late here on the blog. Once my work was done on the new web site for the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, I hit the road with Ruth for a month of writing in a cabin somewhere in…
