Radiant Robin
September 28th, 2010
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Rainy day pictures
September 27th, 2010
Some photos that I took back when and didn't get around to posting.
Female Black-Throated
Blue Warbler
Photographed in last year's fall migration. The field mark for a female
Black-Throated Blue is subtle but a clincher: it's that little whitish spot on
her wing. The male, of course, is all field mark!
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The monarch mimic. Real monarchs lack the two lines across the rear wings.
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Lesser Yellowlegs
September 26th, 2010
A few pictures of the fall migrant
Lesser Yellowlegs at
Shirley's Bay last week. The tameness of this species is such a pleasure for
photographers.
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Wow!
September 21st, 2010
Starting at 10:30 tonight, and continuing for about twenty minutes, multiple
migrant flocks of killdeer passing over our apartment building, their
calls--killydee, killydee, killydee--echoing in the night sky. Some of the
flocks sounded huge!
I know people in rural areas hear this sort of thing all the time, but it's a
pleasure I've never had here in our humble, five-minutes-from-downtown
apartment.
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The Egret Invasion
September 20th, 2010
The
Great Egret is
historically very rare in Ottawa. But as of this year there's been a
surprising influx of them into our area. Over thirty have been sighted lately
foraging and roosting at Shirley's Bay.
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They mingle freely with the more common Great Blue Herons, the two species
often foraging right next to each other.
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Swamp Sparrow
September 19th, 2010
Swamp Sparrows were
abundant at Shirley's Bay yesterday morning--migrating through, perhaps. The
bushes below the dike teemed with them, and they joined the shorebirds in
foraging on the drier, weedy part of the mud flat.
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PLOVER FIGHT!
September 18th, 2010
Have you ever played
Adventure? If so, remember the reference to plover
eggs? Did you, like me, assume that there was really no such thing as a
plover's egg, and that you'd find out later in the game what sort of
fantastical creature a plover was supposed to be (but you never did)?
Well, they exist. They're shorebirds related to sandpipers. Their primary
field mark is that they are cute. Okay, I lie. Their primary field marks are
their comparatively short, stout bills (as opposed to sandpipers' long, thin
ones), and their habit of running in short starts and stops. But the cuteness
definitely takes third place. Our breeding plover is the
Killdeer,
which you've heard me describe before, if you've been following along. In
spring and fall a small variety of others move through in migration.
I photographed this pair of
Black-Bellied
Plovers at Shirley's Bay this morning. It seems one of them intruded into
the other's personal space one time too many.
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Sunshine
September 14th, 2010
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A Single Candle
September 13th, 2010
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Montreal Botanical Gardens (Plan B)
September 11th, 2010
So today our big plan (me, Mike, and my folks, visiting from the states) was
to go to the Biodome. I was all psyched to introduce my mom to the place;
she's a nature-lover like me. I brought my camera. We were slated to arrive in
the early afternoon. I figured that was the perfect time, on the perfect day,
to take advantage of the big skylights in some of the exhibits and get good
photos sans flash. Tropical birds, Canadian birds, diving ducks up close,
various mammals and reptiles. Like a fool, I never bothered to, say, call them
up, or have a look at their
handy
easily-accessible website, which might have changed my mind about a thing
or two.
So we drove two point something hours from Ottawa to Montreal and...well, have
you ever seen
National Lampoon Vacation? Remember how they arrive to an
empty parking lot and go "oh hey, we're the first ones here!" and then they
run joyously to the entrance to the accompaniment of "Chariots of Fire", and
then they finally get there and see the big "closed" sign and the statue of
Marty Moose with the speaker in it that says, "Sorry folks!" And then Chevy
Chase buys a gun and hijacks a roller coaster and shoots John Candy in the
butt? Yeah, that.
Except for that last part.
But believe me, we
thought about that last part.
Plan B was the Botanical Gardens. Which was nice. I think the Chinese garden
was my favorite of those we saw. My pictures are mostly shite. Too much sun,
bleaching all the color out. I had timed us for indoors-with-skylights
photography, not outdoors photography. I did manage to get a few good ones
later in the afternoon, or with the sun behind a tree. Haven't decided how
many I'll post yet.
This one, at least.
It's called a Torch Lily.
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