Female Mountain Bluebird Removing Fecal Sac From Nestbox

The nesting season of Mountain Bluebirds in Montana’s Centennial Valley was delayed this year due to a late spring cold snap so during my visit there last week some of them were still feeding youngsters in the nest boxes. I’ve found it to be relatively easy to photograph the parent birds on top of the nest boxes with insects for the chicks in their beaks but catching them in flight as they leave the nest with fecal sacs is another story altogether.

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An Elk Calf In Distress

This past Sunday morning as I crested a very large hill (Monida Hill) at the west end of the Centennial Valley I noticed an elk calf below me and behind a fence. As soon as I stopped my pickup and the road noise quit I could tell it was in distress from the almost constant noise it was making. I don’t know what to call that sound so I’ll simply refer to it as a “call”. The sound was pitiful and almost heartbreaking to hear.

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Swainson’s Hawk In Flight

This is the time of year that Swainson’s Hawks usually begin to converge on the Centennial Valley to feast on grasshoppers and believe me the area produces grasshoppers in abundance – probably more of them than I’ve ever seen elsewhere (and I grew up on a Montana farm where grasshoppers were unfortunately one of our most successful crops).

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Landing Red-tailed Hawk

This image goes back into my archives about as far back as they go. It was taken on October 1, 2007 – just a few months after I became serious about my photography. I was still shooting with my first digital camera, the Canon Rebel XTi which I still have. It’s an entry-level camera and I still remember what the camera salesman said when I told him that I was planning on mounting that small camera onto a huge Canon 500 mm lens – “well, it will work but don’t you think it’ll look a little silly?”

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Bird Banding – A Necessary Evil?

For the first six years of my bird photography “career” I rarely encountered banded birds but in the last two years or so I encounter them regularly, some species more than others. Usually when I see a bird with bands or transmitters strapped to their backs I don’t even click the shutter except for documentation purposes.

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Savannah Sparrow Feeding Fledgling

During our last Montana trip we had multiple sessions over several days with a very cooperative Savannah Sparrow – “cooperative” in the sense that the bird could always be found in the same spot along the shore of Lower Red Rock Lake in Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.

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Sapsuckers Cleaning Out The Nest Hole

The 5″ x 8″ (interior dimensions) tree nest hole of the Williamson’s Sapsucker with as many as 6 growing nestlings inside presents a significant potential hygiene problem. This post is about how the adults dealt with that situation as I was photographing them about three weeks near the Montana/Idaho border.

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