Pileated Woodpecker

Cornell Lab of Ornithology

 

A simply stunning shot of a male Pileated Woodpecker in flight—notice how he has twisted his neck around so that his head is upside-down relative to his body. Thanks to David Mintz in Florida for the photo.

I was fortunate to see a Pileated Woodpeck back in 2007 - walking in the woods with my dog, Kylie, I head the drumming and looked up to see one in a dead tree by the river.  I gasped and gave thanks to Nature for allowing me that opportunity as they are rare what with all of the development in the area.

Reddish Egret

 

Birdwatching

Reddish Egret (Egretta rufescens) in Florida, USA by ER Post on Flickr.

I'm late, I'm late for a very important date...

(Image from here)

No time to say Hello, Goodbye! I'm late, I'm late, I'm late!

Australian Pelicans

Birdwatching

Australian Pelicans in breeding colors. In the breeding season the large bills take on brighter colors and are used as flags to attract the opposite sex when they flap in the breeze. 

Kangaroo Island, South Australia by Grame Guy. 

Eagle Huntress

                          

Ashol-Pan, the now 14-year-old Mongolian/Kazakh celebrity who rose to fame online, is a primary example of the potential of new media technologies to transform the lives of nomadic women. In January, 2016, Ashol-Pan will star alongside her family in Eagle Huntress, a documentary that follows her life in the remote mountains of Tsambagarav Uul National Park. The film will also call attention to the rapidly disappearing tradition of eagle hunting.

A day earlier, Ashol-Pan’s mother, Almagul, had sat in front of the camera and talked about her daily life, oriented around caring for livestock and making dairy products and food for her family. She has never eagle-hunted, although she often feeds and cares for her daughter’s and husband’s eagles. She has a cellphone, which she uses infrequently, and watches television occasionally with her family — especially films in Mongolian. She likes technology, but is in no way attached to it. She is proud of her daughter’s fame, but then, she is proud of all of her four children. And while she feels that technology has played a role in her daughter’s celebrity status, she does not have a desire to use technology more regularly. She is satisfied with her life.

At the end of the interview, I asked: “How has fame changed your daughter’s life?” Almagul smiled. “We’ve been very lucky. I’m very proud of my daughter. But, I also worry about her. In Mongolia, we have this belief that fame is bad luck. So, I worry that too much fame will bring my daughter bad luck.”

You can read the rest of this article here.

 

You can see more pictures of Ashol-Pan here, along with more information about her and Mongolian nomad culture.

Wizardry

(Click to enlarge)

Merlin catching a dragonfly

Photo by Carl Woo

Audubon Photography Awards 2015

(where you can find the top 100 amazing photos)

H is for Hawk

Here is an excerpt of a book review from Death of a Million Trees.  You can read the entire blog entry here.

Origins of the inhabitants

At the end of a challenging hunt, Helen and Mabel encounter a herd of deer.  Helen describes the scene:

“The running deer and the running hare.  Legacies of trade and invasion, farming, hunting, settlement.  Hares were introduced, it is thought, by the Romans.  Fallow deer certainly were.  Pheasants, too, brought in their burnished hordes from Asia Minor.  The partridges possessing this ground were originally from France, and the ones I see here were hatched in game-farm forced-air incubators.  The squirrel on the sweet chestnut?  North America.  Rabbits?  Medieval introductions.  Felt, meat, fur, feather, from all corners.  But possessing the ground, all the same.”

On this bucolic scene, a couple appears and admires the herd of deer:  “The deer.  Special, aren’t they, those ones.  Rare…A herd of deer.  Doesn’t it give you hope?  Isn’t it a relief that there’re things still like that, a real bit of Old England still left, despite all those immigrants coming in?”

The encounter with the deer is ruined for Helen by this xenophobic comment:

“It is a miserable walk.  I should have said something.  But embarrassment had stopped my tongue.  Stomping along, I start pulling on the thread of darkness they’d handed me.  I think of the chalk-cult countryside and all its myths of blood-belonging, and that hateful bronze falcon, of Göring’s plans to exclude Jews from German forests.  I think of the Finnish goshawks that made the Brecklands home, and of my grandfather, born on the Western Isles, who spoke nothing but Gaelic until he was ten.  And the Lithuanian builder I’d met collecting mushrooms in a wood who asked me, bewildered, why no one he’d met in England knew which were edible, and which were not.  I think of all the complicated histories that landscapes have, and how easy it is to wipe them away, put easier, safer histories in their place.”

Black Cockatoo

Animal lovers

Beautiful young Black Cockatoo.

Image & Text: David Whelan Photography

Learn more about these beautiful birds here (PDF). Click on image to enlarge it.

Pelican

(Image from FB)