A Tribute To The “Common Species”

Many bird photographers tend to largely ignore the most common species in their areas and I’m as guilty of that as anyone.

There seems to be a sort of “supply and demand” philosophy – the more common they are the less appealing they are as subjects. That’s too bad for at least a couple of reasons – familiar birds can be just as interesting and beautiful as many of the others and what’s “common” where we live and/or shoot is very often uncommon or even nonexistent for folks in other areas. This post is meant to make up to some degree for my own poor judgment at times in choosing subjects.

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Several Sparrow Species In Frost And Snow

In my area most sparrow species aren’t easy to approach or catch out in the open for most of the year but when it’s very cold and they decide it’s time to begin their communal morning feeding routine they become much braver souls. Earlier this week I photographed three species of sparrows as they harvested seeds from their frost-covered parent plants.

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Strange Encounter with a Northern Harrier and a Junco

For me, life just doesn’t get much better than when I’m watching interesting or unusual bird behaviors up close.  I was photographing this male Northern Harrier out my pickup window while it was perched on the clump of snow-bent vegetation you see in the image below when I heard a soft scratching sound coming from the front of my truck.  I quickly glanced to my right and noticed that a Dark-eyed Junco had landed square in the middle of the hood of the truck.  I thought that was unusual of course but I was more interested in the harrier so I quickly turned back to watching him through my viewfinder and it immediately became apparent that the harrier was now fixated on that junco.         1/3200, f/8, ISO 400, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc  I’ve spent hundreds of hours watching and photographing harriers and it’s virtually unheard of for one to take off in my direction when I’m this close to the bird.  Usually the direction of take off is away from me or if I’m lucky it might be either to my left or right.  But this one had apparently decided that it wanted junco for lunch and when it launched it immediately turned slightly and headed straight toward the junco on my truck hood.     1/3200, f/8, ISO 400, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc If you look carefully at the harriers eyes in all four shots you’ll notice that he isn’t really focused on me – instead he’s looking slightly to my right, directly at the junco on the hood of the…

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