MaeZe, how's the bird hunt going?
I don't want to hog this thread -- bring us your northern hemisphere birds! -- but here's a(n underexposed)
white-bellied sea eagle watching us from a paperbark. I would have tried for an even closer shot, but the paperbark was on the bank of a river and there are lots of big salties in that area.
And some
rainbow bee-eaters.
OMG, your images are so gorgeous.
Backyard birds have been quiet around here lately. There was a smaller bird attacking an eagle yesterday, too high up to get a good look at the attacker. I usually see one hummingbird a day. They are so funny, they fly near my flowered shirt, spend a few seconds in a holding pattern then move on.
I haven't heard any quail families lately, not sure why.
I'm trying to decide if the regular chirp I hear from the forest might be an owlet now that I know what the great gray and great horned owlets sound like when they are begging for food.
On the bird cams, the osprey have had their share of tragedies, losing chicks to a shortage of fish, an accidental placement of a parental claw (suspected) and an owl predation. But there are a lot of osprey chicks.
There were two peregrine falcon nests on the cams. In one nest a smaller (late hatch) eyas had everyone worried because it seemed to be getting less food. But in no time it learned how to be aggressive and survived just fine. Not sure it mattered but the little one was a male with three female sibs. All four fledged.
In the other nest two died after a black fly swarm hit the nest day after day. Eventually the two remaining eyasses fell out of the nest but the parents fed them on the ground (in heavy brush) and they eventually fledged.
The beautiful great grays and great horned owlets all fledged and they were so fun to watch. Owls are now my absolute favorites.
On the eagle front, what drama. On one nest two males and one female were raising two eaglets. They were attacked by other eagles. The female disappeared and the the two remaining sibling males raised the two eaglets which fledged.
On a Vancouver Island nest, a red-tail hawk ended up in an eagle nest with two eaglets. The parent eagles raised it all the way to fledging. There was so much learning for folks like me about that one. Once the hawk fledged, the parent eagles actually paid more attention to it than to the eaglets that weren't mature enough to fledge. Something about the stages of parenting they go through with fledging triggering a parental change. The weirdest thing, eaglets will often kill siblings and here was this much smaller hawk getting fed first and two larger eaglets deferring to it. You had to wonder if being older/smarter wasn't winning out over larger in that nest. Ming boggling.
The latest addition is a puffin chick that doesn't do much except eat and sleep but the parents are funny to watch.
That's pretty much the current summary of my backyard and the bird nest cams.
