Bird Oddities – Page 22 – Feathered Photography

An Amazingly Resilient One-legged Ibis

Last week I came across this one-legged White-faced Ibis at Farmingtom Bay. Normally, these birds feed by slowly wading through the water and locating their invertebrate prey by tactile probing of the muddy substrate. Their long, recurved and extremely sensitive bill is an ideal tool for this purpose. But this bird, of course, is unable to wade. So it would stand in one spot for a few seconds while feeding and then jump to the next spot with great effort. The problem it had with this method was maintaining balance as it was landing in the new spot, since it couldn’t put down the missing leg for support. So, as it landed it would use that long bill as a sort of substitute for the missing leg and foot, thus gaining an additional balancing and support point in the mud. Here it has just regained balance and is closing its wings and pulling its long bill off of the mud. Perhaps what the bird was doing can be better visualised from this one photo, where you can tell from the turbulence around the right leg that the ibis has just landed in this spot a split second before and that it is using its long bill to brace itself in order to regain balance. And here I caught the ibis just as it was “landing” on a new feeding spot – the water is actually fairly deep here. I hope this post isn’t seen as much…

“Rushing” Western Grebes

The ritualized displays and courtship ceremonies of Western Grebes are among the most complex known in the bird world. One of them is called the “rushing ceremony” which includes 5 distinct phases – only one of which is actually referred to as “rushing”. Yesterday I finally was able to photograph this most dramatic part of the display and believe me it’s been a long time coming. Mia and I were photographing a pair of these grebes with chicks and though we both were aware of another small group of grebes a little further away I was concentrating so intently on those chicks that I didn’t notice what Mia noticed – that the behavior of two of those birds had suddenly changed. She said “they’re going to do something” so all I had time to do was quickly aim my lens at these birds and fire away. Without Mia I’d have missed the entire sequence. 1/2500, f/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc When rushing, the two birds (usually a mated pair but two males may also do it to attract females) lunge forward and rise completely out of the water. 1/2500, f/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc As their legs and feet start to churn at incredible speeds their bodies begin to become more vertical… 1/2500, f/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc until the birds are almost completely vertical to the water and their feet are slapping the surface so fast (16-20 steps per second) that the slapping and splashing noise is loud and can be heard a great distance away. The…

Bill Deformities

I’m seeing more bill deformities “out there” than I used to and that disturbs me. The latest example was a Sage Thrasher we found on Antelope Island four days ago. This is what a normal bill on a Sage Thrasher looks like. Notice that the upper mandible is slightly longer than the lower one with a curved tip at the terminus and that both mandibles fit together tightly showing no evidence of a gap between them. But in this thrasher the upper mandible is significantly shorter than the lower and the curve of the two mandibles doesn’t match so they don’t fit together well, leaving a gap. This is definitely not a temporary, voluntary position of the bill as I have about a dozen shots of the bird over a period of about a minute that show the same thing. The two mandibles never fit together cleanly and the upper one is definitely shorter. With this head turn you can see the other side. I can only imagine how this would interfere with normal preening as the bird attempts to draw the individual feathers through the bill to lock the barbs together. An extreme crop of the previous image. Notice how the back of the mandibles touch each other and prevent the rest of the bill from coming together because their curves don’t match along the entire length of the bill. At first I thought that the end of the lower mandible looked damaged or eroded but perhaps there’s just something on the bill that…

The Return of Long-billed Curlews and Rhyncokinesis

Each day for the past several weeks while on our way out to the island either Mia or I will say to the other “I wonder if we’ll see or hear the curlews this morning”. For both of us the return of the curlews is a sure sign that true spring has finally arrived. And each morning we’ve been disappointed. Until yesterday! We first heard them while waiting for some magpies to return to their nest and then looked up and saw several flying toward us. 1/2500, f/6.3, ISO 500, 500 f/4 This bird is one of them – a truly unremarkable photograph except for its significance to us. It’s almost like this bird (and its companion) were flying over us to personally announce their return to us. The curlews are back – finally! 1/1600, f/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc It wasn’t long before we were able to find several curlews foraging on the ground and they even let us get close. This one is busy preening in the morning sun. 1/1600, f/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc Rhyncokinesis (rhynco – upper beak or bill, kinesis – movement or motion) is the ability of some birds to bend or flex their upper bill. Only cranes, shorebirds, swifts and hummingbirds are known to be capable of doing so. The bill is made of a protein called keratin (like hair or fingernails) and it’s quite a remarkable feat to be able to control its shape to some degree. Notice in the photo above that the shapes…

Odd Behavior In A Young Male Northern Harrier

It’s likely that I’m more interested in bird behaviors than some of my readers – if so I hope you’ll bear with me through this post. Even though the light was terrible for photography much of the time, witnessing this odd behavior was a treat for me. As most folks who try to photograph harriers know, they’re generally an elusive quarry and difficult to get close to. Occasionally you may get a close fly-by if you’re lucky but yesterday I had an experience with a harrier that I had never seen before and I’ve spent a lot of time around harriers. Mia and I first found the bird (a young male just transitioning to adult plumage) perched close to the road and as we attempted to get close for some shots it lifted off, just as we expected. I assumed it was long gone as usually happens with these birds but that’s not how it turned out. 1/1000, f/5.6, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc As we were preparing to drive further down the road we noticed the harrier coming back and it landed quite close to us again. Very unusual, so we decided to hang around and see how the cards played out. 1/1000, f/5.6, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc The harrier began to call. Sometimes it sounded like the typical harrier call that I’ve heard so many times in the past but occasionally this bird sounded different – Mia thought it sounded almost like a parrot. 1/1000, f/5.6, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc It stayed on the same…

Red-tailed Hawk with Long-billed Hawk Syndrome

This morning I found this Red-tailed Hawk on a telephone pole near Grantsville, Utah. As soon as I looked at it through my lens I knew that something was wrong with the birds beak. A bit of research almost immediately turned up the probable culprit – Long-billed Hawk Syndrome. Birds with this condition have atypical uncontrolled growth of either or both upper and lower bills. Birds affected often have secondary infections in their bills. Since their bills are used for activities such as eating, preening, killing prey and feeding offspring the syndrome is extremely serious. Most birds with this condition die of starvation. The syndrome gets its name because most affected birds have been Red-tailed Hawks, though other species of raptors get the condition also, including Peregrine Falcons and Rough-legged Hawks. The first case of LBH Syndrome was reported in Washington state in 1997 and reports have been increasing since. This is what a normal Red-tailed Hawk’s bill looks like – quite a dramatic and obvious contrast to the diseased one. The cause of this condition is unknown, though research is ongoing. A sad situation for this poor bird. More info here. Ron Addendum: I posted one of these photos on a nature phography forum and a veterinarian with many years of experience with falconry birds has stated unequivocally that this hawks condition occurred because it was “kept jessed and tethered by someone who was totally ignorant of the necessity to keep the upper and lower bill trimmed to normal shape”. Whatever the true cause of the deformity, it’s…

Bald Eagle Nictitating Membrane

The nictitating membrane (nictitan) is a membrane or “third eyelid” found in some vertebrates that can be drawn across the eye for protection and to moisten and lubricate the surface of the eye. It is either translucent or semi-transparent so the animal maintains sight while it covers the eye. Birds, sharks and some reptiles have a fully functional nictitating membrane while in most mammals there is only a small vestigial remnant in the corner of the eye. However camels, polar bears, seals, aardvarks, marsupials and monotremes do have fully functional membranes. 1/2000, f/8. ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc This nearly adult (head not yet completely white) Bald Eagle is neither tame or captive. But for several days in 2009, beginning on a bitterly cold Christmas morning, this adult adopted a favorite perch (a relatively short pole) that looked out over a pond with fish in it. The pole was so close to the road that I sometimes had to take off my teleconverter to get the entire bird in the frame. It warmed my heart that the eagle was so comfortable with me this close and that was a very good thing because Mia and I almost froze to death over the many hours of photographing this magnificent bird. This is the normal appearance of the Bald Eagle’s eye. In adult birds, eye color is typically some shade of yellow with a distinctly visible pupil (though juvenile birds have much darker eyes). 1/2000, f/8. ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc But every few seconds the bird swipes the nictitating membrane across the…

Angry Barn Swallow

As I approached the parking lot at Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge just before taking the loop road there were myriads of swallows flying around as per usual in spring and early summer. I noticed this Barn Swallow on a post and decided to take a few shots. It let me approach very closely and I didn’t know why at first but it soon became very apparent that this bird was in distress. If you look closely at the image above you’ll notice that there is “something” connecting the tips of a tail feather and one of the primary wing feathers that prevented this bird from flying and as a result it was a very unhappy and frustrated bird! I photographed this swallow for over 10 minutes as it struggled to solve its incomprehensible problem. It would alternately attempt to break the connection by raising and extending its wings and… trying to reach the problem area with its beak, which it just couldn’t quite do. At times its apparent anger and frustration (anthropomorphic of me, I know) became quite evident as it would momentarily cease struggling and just sit there and call out pitifully. But eventually the connection between the feathers broke and the bird flew off instantly – so fast that I missed the shot. I still don’t know for sure what substance caused this problem. It has been suggested by others that it could have been spider silk. I’ve also wondered about the possibility of sticky tree…

White Pelican Stretching Pouch in Flight.

American White Pelicans are known to do some pretty strange things with their pouch – one of them is pouch stretching (I’ve been unable to find an official term for the behavior). A four year old image – I no longer have the original file so can’t access exif data They pull their head back and force their very flexible pouch down over their neck and upper chest in a process that looks, well.. bizarre. I don’t think this behavior is particularly unusual as I’ve seen and photographed it several times. According to Birds of North America Online the function of this display is “uncertain”. Canon 7D, 1/5000, f/6.3, ISO 500 However, these birds are also fully capable of pulling the bottom of their pouch up above the level of the lower mandibles without having to pull the pouch down over their neck. I don’t fully understand how they’re able to do this since the pouch itself is non-muscular. Internet research on the subject has been unproductive. I assume there must be some form of bony or cartilaginous rod that extends from the throat area down the middle of the bottom of the pouch about half way to the tip of the bill. With muscular control of the base of that extension in the throat area they would be able to raise the bottom of the pouch above “horizontal”. I’ve seen them do it twice – the first time without a camera while the bird was perched. But the second time, a couple of weeks ago, it was done in flight which…

A Loggerhead Shrike, a Spider and Spit

A few days ago Mia and I found this Loggerhead Shrike sitting prettily on a dried sunflower on Antelope Island. The bird was using the sunflower as a hunting perch. 1/1600, f/8, ISO 500 I’ve always been amazed by the incredible eyesight of many bird species. This shrike somehow spotted a spider crawling through the thick grass about 20 feet away from where it was perched and immediately flew down to grab it. 1/1600, f/7.1, ISO 500 It was a relatively small spider and I have no idea how the shrike was able to see it in all the dense grass. Even though the background is busy here I still liked the shot for the interesting look at both the spider and the tongue of the shrike. It’s my presumption from looking at this photo that the saliva of the shrike is viscous and sticky, enabling the prey to stay attached to the tongue during the very fast process of pulling the spider to the back of the throat with the tongue. 1/1600, f/7.1, ISO 500 A heavily cropped, close-up view of the same image provides a clue. You can see that there’s a sheet of saliva stretched between the bottom of the tongue and the floor of the lower mandible and it does appear to be quite viscous. I had no idea that it would be so “juicy” in there. Nothing earth-shattering here, just some avian trivia in a photo that I found interesting (yes, my interests can be…

Handedness in Short-eared Owls

Last summer Mia and I spent four days photographing a family of Short-eared Owls in Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. There were two baby owls in a nest under a sagebrush guarded over constantly by the female while the male hunted and brought in food. That food in every instance that we saw was a vole (mouse-like rodent). Many of the photos I took were of the male in flight, returning to the area of the nest with a vole in his talons. Male with vole It wasn’t until I returned home and began processing the images that I began to notice that the male always seemed to carry the vole in its left foot. This piqued my curiosity about something I’d never considered – do some birds show “handedness” – the preference of using one limb as opposed to the other? Could this male owl, or perhaps all Short-eared Owls, be left-“handed”? Once again, carrying the vole in the left foot So I decided to do an inventory of my images of these birds to see what would turn up. After culling my photos of these owls from this trip I had 271 photos to go through. Most of those were flight shots of the male and in more than half of them he was carrying a vole. My goal was to try to determine how many “sorties” he made with a vole that I had photographed (I often got multiple shots of the male with the same vole in the same sortie) and determine what percentage of the time he…

The Bald Eagle and the Fish Hook

Last week while looking for Golden Eagles to photograph in the Promontory area at the north end of the Great Salt Lake we came across a group of adult and juvenile Bald Eagles feeding on a sheep carcass. The light angle was bad for photography but we couldn’t resist taking a few shots anyway. Bald Eagle with fish hook in bill We were quite close to one adult and when it flew off I instinctively fired off a few shots, despite the poor light. When I got home and looked carefully at those images I could clearly see this gold fish hook embedded in the base of the eagle’s bill. This bird was apparently feeding normally and I suspect that the hook will not cause it significant problems while it’s in Utah for the winter feeding on carrion. However I am concerned that, because of the position of the hook in front of the eyes, the hook will interfere with effective forward vision for fishing after it heads north in March. I hope it falls out or rusts off before that although I’m not sure if “gold” fish hooks rust at all. An internet search shows that fish hooks are an ongoing problem for both Bald Eagles and Ospreys. Ron

Bathing Cinnamon Teal/Green-winged Teal hybrid

Though bathing is a common activity for waterfowl it can make for some interesting photographs. I found this bird at Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge at the end of May last year. Cinnamon Teal x Green-winged Teal Hybrid male While I was processing some of the images I noticed the unusual crescent-shaped marking running through the eye to the back of the head that is typical of the Green-winged Teal. I asked several very knowledgeable birders about this bird and they think this is a CT/GWT hybrid, which apparently is quite unusual. Red eye looking at you through a layer of water While bathing he would repeatedly dunk his head and shoulders under water and then lift them up, which would roll water over its back and wings. An interesting process to watch and photograph at such close range. Here he’s looking at me through a layer of water over his head and eye as he brings his head out of the water. Forcing water over the back Here’s the water on the back. Washing the back feathers Then he would shake vigorously which would wash the back and upper wing feathers and send water droplets flying. Rearranging the wing feathers After so much vigorous activity the feathers, particularly those in the wing, needed rearranging to put them in their proper places. Preening after the bath Then came the preening. Lots of it. Here he is grooming individual breast/lower neck feathers. After the bath And here…

Canvasback – Feeding and Fighting Behavior

In April of 2008 I photographed some interesting Canvasback feeding and fighting behaviors at a local pond. At the time I was still a relative novice at bird photography so I’ll say up front that this blog post is more about the behaviors than it is about image quality. The almost white plumage and dark head made for a tricky exposure for a beginner and there was a significant issue with specular highlights caused by reflections off of the shiny mud. Dive, eyes open On this day there was one drake feeding quite close to me and I was very interested in the whole process. He would continually dive down to the muck at the bottom of the pond and come up with his head completely covered in thick dark mud. Sometimes he would dive with his eyes open, like this. Dive, eyes closed And other times he would dive with his eyes closed. Either way, mud and grit in the eyes never seemed to be a problem for him. Ol’ Muddy Head 1 When he would emerge, this is what he would look like. Ol’ Muddy Head 2 And this. It never failed – a true mud facial. Canvasbacks are often referred to as the “aristocrats of ducks” but it’s hard to look very aristocratic with a face full of mud. Shakin’ the mud off Occasionally he would try to shake as much of the mud off as possible but it never seemed to change the look of him…

Why Grebes Eat Feathers

Grebes, as a group, are known for eating feathers – usually their own. The obvious question is – why? There would be virtually no nutritional value in a feather. Clark’s Grebe eating a feather I’ve photographed four species of grebes – Western Grebe, Clarks Grebe (these two are very similar), Pied-billed Grebe and Eared Grebe. I’ve been able to document feather eating in all but the Eared Grebe. Western Grebe parent feeding feather to young Over a period of perhaps a half hour I watched this adult feed several feathers to the chicks, who seemed almost as eager to consume the feathers as they did the fish provided by the parents. Western Grebe chick reaching for a feather from its parent Feathers are fed to the young almost immediately after hatching. In fact, feathers are very often the first item eaten by newly hatched chicks of many grebe species. The purpose(s) of feather eating is unproven but evidence suggests that the behavior has these benefits for the birds. Some of the ingested feathers form a plug in the pylorus, between the stomach and small intestine, which acts as a strainer to keep fish bones in the stomach long enough to be completely digested. Most swallowed feathers end up in the stomach lumen, mixed with food. They eventually (along with any indigestible matter) form pellets that are ejected through the mouth. The continuous passage of these pellets through the upper digestive system minimizes the buildup of a variety of parasites that are very common there and plague grebes. Pied-billed…

Category: Bird Oddities