Category: Wading Birds

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…

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The Timelessness of a Buffalo Chip Perch

The American Bison is a relative newcomer to North America, having migrated from Eurasia over the Bering Straight about 10,000 years ago.  As is common knowledge they once roamed in massive herds across most of the continent until commercial hunting and slaughter reduced their numbers to a few hundred by the end of the 19th century.    1/500, f/6.3, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc Today a herd of approximately 500 animals roams free on Antelope Island and that many large animals produce a lot of poop – commonly referred to as “buffalo chips”.  Those chips are all over the island – like small dark islands in a sea of prairie grasses and tiny flowers and they’re tempting perches for a variety of bird species like Horned Larks and Meadowlarks.  But this past week I was able to catch some larger birds using them as perches.      1/2000, f/6.3, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc In the spring some of the shorebirds and wading birds come up from the shore of the Great Salt Lake to higher ground on the island for their breeding activities – Long-billed Curlews among them.  It seems that the added height of only a couple of inches provided by the chip is enough to significantly improve their view of the landscape for potential predators and also to help them keep an eye on other curlews in the area – there’s a lot of fighting and mating activities going on this time of year. To some viewers such a perch may have no aesthetic draw but I’m…

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Weather Loach in Utah – Another Invasive Species

  On December 12, 2007 I photographed this Common Goldeneye with a fish at Farmington Bay Wildlife Management Area.  At the time I didn’t pay much attention to what kind of fish it might be and then just kind of forgot about it.  Male Common Goldeneye with unidentified (at the time) fish    The moment of capture Then, on October 2, 2008, I took some photos of a Snowy Egret fishing, also at Farmington.  Finally, I became curious about the unusual fish – noticing the atypical elongated almost eel-like body in particular. I made some casual inquiries of refuge personnel about fish species present there but didn’t get anything definitive that would match this fish.   More time went by, then I finally showed Justina Parsons-Bernstein some of the photos and asked her about the fish.  She is the Director of The Great Salt Lake Nature Center at Farmington Bay WMA and she was also curious as to what species of fish it was so she sent some of my images to a vertebrate specialist with the state of Utah.  He keyed it out as a Weather Loach. It turns out that the Weather Loach or Dojo Loach as it is also known (Misgurnus anguillicaudatus) is quite a remarkable fish.  The name Weather Loach comes from the fact that it is highly sensitive to minor changes in barometric pressure and when it perceives such a change its behaviour becomes erratic, active and animated.  Humans have kept them captive as a weather indicator for centuries.  They are a very hardy species, capable of surviving poor conditions by swallowing atmospheric…

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