Living Color on the Eardley Escarpment (part 2)
June 4th, 2017
(Part 1)
As I was hiking back I heard the distinctive "chick-burr" of a Scarlet Tanager. Scarlet Tanager is an amazingly red little bird (the males are red, that is, females are yellow) that, frustratingly, spends almost all its time at the tops of tall, leafy deciduous trees. I enjoy them through binoculars every year, in places where they breed (South March Highlands, Gatineau Park, and even parts of Stony Swamp), but never once have I gotten a photo worth showing. But as I reached the spot where the "chick-burr" was coming from, I was delighted to see a male tanager swooping down low...and then amazed when he came lower, and lower, until he was actually on the ground! I think that he was likely guarding his mate as she gathered nest material. I can think of no other reason for a Scarlet Tanager to go to ground.
Of course I took pictures. He was distant and tricky to get in focus--and photos never entirely do justice to this bird (ideally you need to be there, with a good set of binoculars, looking up at the reddest thing you ever saw, a bird that honestly seems to glow red, thinking "my god, am I in tropical South America or am I still in Canada?") But these are certainly the best adult male photos that I've ever obtained.
Surprise number two happened further back down the trail, when I came to a spot where the underbrush was just positively alive with very tiny, very fast-moving creatures. There were many small openings in the brush, at the base of a tree trunk, under logs, etc., and they darted in and out of those openings at the speed of light, never in view for more than a fraction of a second. I struggled to even see them clearly, much less photograph them.
Finally, I pointed my camera at one of the tree holes that they were scurrying in and out of, and rapid-fired my shutter, producing about twenty pictures of an empty hole and one picture of this! (To give an idea of scale, the hole was maybe an inch and a half wide.)
That's a shrew--one of the tiniest mammals in the world, even smaller than a mouse. Shrews aren't rodents, but miniature carnivores, most closely related to moles, who eat insects, spiders, amphibians, small rodents, and even other shrews. Their frenetic activity and voracious appetites are supported by a super-charged metabolism which rivals that of a hummingbird: a shrew can starve to death within a few hours without food.
Sadly, there are a number of lookalike shrews in Ontario so there is no way to determine the exact species of this one. The likely candidates, I'm told, are Smoky Shrew, Common Shrew, and Short-Tailed Shrew.
June 4th, 2017
(Part 1)
As I was hiking back I heard the distinctive "chick-burr" of a Scarlet Tanager. Scarlet Tanager is an amazingly red little bird (the males are red, that is, females are yellow) that, frustratingly, spends almost all its time at the tops of tall, leafy deciduous trees. I enjoy them through binoculars every year, in places where they breed (South March Highlands, Gatineau Park, and even parts of Stony Swamp), but never once have I gotten a photo worth showing. But as I reached the spot where the "chick-burr" was coming from, I was delighted to see a male tanager swooping down low...and then amazed when he came lower, and lower, until he was actually on the ground! I think that he was likely guarding his mate as she gathered nest material. I can think of no other reason for a Scarlet Tanager to go to ground.
Of course I took pictures. He was distant and tricky to get in focus--and photos never entirely do justice to this bird (ideally you need to be there, with a good set of binoculars, looking up at the reddest thing you ever saw, a bird that honestly seems to glow red, thinking "my god, am I in tropical South America or am I still in Canada?") But these are certainly the best adult male photos that I've ever obtained.
Surprise number two happened further back down the trail, when I came to a spot where the underbrush was just positively alive with very tiny, very fast-moving creatures. There were many small openings in the brush, at the base of a tree trunk, under logs, etc., and they darted in and out of those openings at the speed of light, never in view for more than a fraction of a second. I struggled to even see them clearly, much less photograph them.
Finally, I pointed my camera at one of the tree holes that they were scurrying in and out of, and rapid-fired my shutter, producing about twenty pictures of an empty hole and one picture of this! (To give an idea of scale, the hole was maybe an inch and a half wide.)
That's a shrew--one of the tiniest mammals in the world, even smaller than a mouse. Shrews aren't rodents, but miniature carnivores, most closely related to moles, who eat insects, spiders, amphibians, small rodents, and even other shrews. Their frenetic activity and voracious appetites are supported by a super-charged metabolism which rivals that of a hummingbird: a shrew can starve to death within a few hours without food.
Sadly, there are a number of lookalike shrews in Ontario so there is no way to determine the exact species of this one. The likely candidates, I'm told, are Smoky Shrew, Common Shrew, and Short-Tailed Shrew.
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Mike
June 4th, 2017 at 9:08 am
Sweet catches! The tanager glows, and the shrew is awfully hard to find for such a common animal!
Mustang Sallie
June 5th, 2017 at 10:32 pm
So....You finally got a shot of the elusive Scarlet Tanager. BEAUTIFUL!!!!!
As for the Shrew (cute little critters that they are), I could use a few of those in my yard to devour some of those pesky litle creatures that are attacking my plants and flowers.
In any case, they are both great shots that must have required a lot of patient waiting and observing. Congrats!