Carpenter Banding

Every once in a while I am fortunate enough to get some time off on a Friday. On those days I like to head over to the Carpenter Nature Center to check out the bird banding. June 13th was one of those days, unfortunately it was also a bit windy that day so there were not many birds that were being caught in the nets. When it is windy the nets blow in the wind and the birds spot the movement and thus more of them avoid the nets. In the hour and a half that I was there I only spotted this gray catbird in the nets. The interesting part of banding is that you get to see birds up close and at angles that you typically don't see in the wild. For instance it is not often that you get at good look at the rufous undertail coverts of the gray catbird.
Since there were not many birds in the nets I decided to take a walk around the grounds to see what I could spot. Chipping sparrows are quit common in the area right now, as are eastern kingbirds.
With all the flies that we have around this year it is no wonder why a lot of fly catchers,like the eastern kingbirds have decided to stay in the area instead of heading farther north.
There were also several eastern bluebirds around Carpenter. I think that they are nesting in the boxes that they have out in the fields. In an earlier post I mentioned that I have seen a lot more eastern bluebirds in the area then I did last year. Maybe the high bug population this year, except for butterflies which appear to have declined this year, has helped to make them more successful in the area.

Yellowstone Passerines

While we were on our Yellowstone trip we saw a lot of birds that we don't usually see around home but we did see some familiar birds also.
Chipping sparrows were fairly numerous around the park. The top picture was taken on the bank of the Madison River on a snowing Wednesday morning.
Earlier in the week we photographed a chipping sparrow in the same area only the weather was a bit better.

We also saw some white-crowned sparrows. This one was watching me from his perch on the Blacktail Deer Plateau. Although white-crowned sparrows do not usually spend a great deal of time around home they do pass through the state in the spring, on their way up to their Arctic breeding grounds, and in the fall, on their way back to the southern US and Mexico where they winter.Even though I have photographed white-crowned sparrows in Minnesota before this was the first white-crowned sparrow that I ever photographed on bison dung. EWWWWWWWW!
In Minnesota we also get red-breasted nuthatch like the one above, although the white-breasted nuthatch is much more common in Minnesota. I found this bird in the woods on the shore of the mostly frozen Lake Yellowstone.
We saw quite a few of these birds through out the park. At first I did not know what type of bird that it was. Although it did not look like any of the birds that I had seen around home it was in fact a bird that is very common in northern Minnesota in the summer and the southern part of the state in the winter.
I found out that this is a dark-eyed junco. Dark-eyed junco are a lot like red-tailed hawks, in that they have a number of variations that occur, depending on what part of the hemisphere that they live in. In Yellowstone the dark-eyed junco are of the pink-sided variety. In Minnesota we mostly see the slate-colored variety, which tend to be darker and have grey, slate, colored sides instead of pink like the ones above. There is also an Oregon variety, which looks like the slate-colored type except they have a darker head, and the white-winged variety, that look like the slate-colored type with white wing bars.

St Croix National Scenic Riverway Marshland Visitors Center

On our way home from Crex Meadows we stopped at the St Croix National Scenic Riverway Marshland Center. The St Croix National Scenic Riverway is a national park consisting of 252 miles of habitat encircling the St Croix and Namekagon Rivers on the Minnesota and Wisconsin border. The Marshland Visitors Center is only open by appointment but the small grounds surrounding the center as well as the trails following the river are good places to look for passerines. Since Michelle was already tired from our trek around Crex she decided to stay in the car while I took a quick look around.
I did not find anything all that exciting but a few birds did peek out and took their turn in the spot light. This eastern phoebe are sometimes difficult to photograph because of their dark heads. One of the things that I look for when photographing wildlife is to try and get a glint of light in the eye. This helps to make the bird or animal look more life like. When a bird has a dark head the eye often gets lost in the pic. Fortunately it was bright out, which usually helps, and my new lens is much better at picking up light.
Angle of the subject in comparison to the sun is usually important when you are trying to get a shinning eye. The sun light is hitting the breast of the chipping sparrow above and it is not hitting the eye. This makes the eye look flat and two dimensional which does not help the picture to look life like.
When the angle is changed on the chipping sparrow the eye looks more three dimensional and life like.
Unfortunately in wildlife photography you can not control the weather or your subject. You can try and get a perfect angle but sometimes rivers, trees or other things make it difficult or impossible. Try as I might I could not get this field sparrow to pose correctly. This does not mean that the pic is not worth taking, especially since it is the first field sparrow that I have seen this year, some times you just have to be happy with what you get.
There is no use crying over spilled egg. I actually found this egg on one of the hiking trails. I do not know my eggs very well so maybe some one out there can tell us what kind of egg that it is. The small hole in the egg is interesting. I wonder if another bird used its beak to put a hole in the egg to retrieve the contents and then perhaps discarded it when it was finished with the rich yellow protein filled yoke?