For the Birds and Bird Lovers 2018 CAUTION: LARGE IMAGES

A red-eyed vireo.

This one puzzled me for a while, but it's a female American Redstart.

For the botanists, some pitcher plants in full bloom.

Finally, the primordial beaver cruises at sunset:

That's an excellent haul, Twick!

Sitting in my backyard and a hummingbird just came and hovered less than three feet from my face.

MaeZe said:

Sitting in my backyard and a hummingbird just came and hovered less than three feet from my face.

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Yeah, they do that... they also zip by so close they part your hair, quite literally.

And curse directly into your ear.

We got ourselves a humbird war zone in the yard this year...

I did startle when it arrived. I had a 'really giant bug is buzzing me' reaction for the first second or two.

The hummingbirds found my feeder.

They're so teeny.

A tiny little bird flew in my house through my slider door. I tried to shoo it back out through the door but instead it flew into the living room. I couldn't find it and I had a lunch date with my son so I left for a couple hours. When I got back I found it and managed to catch it in the drapes and from there into my hand. I took it back outside.

It sat in my hand for a bit instead of flying off. Then other birds in its family made little tweets and it flew off to where the other birds were.

I don't know if they waited for it or were just there coincidentally. It might have been a fledgling but it looked fully developed.

These are tiny birds that go from tree to tree in groups. I see them all the time. It had green on its wings. I thought these were finches but when I looked at images to identify it, there were other possibilities. It was smaller than the palm of my hand. I'm sorry now I didn't get a pic of it. I was worried about it being harmed by the stress and wanted to get it back outside as soon as I could.

I live near Seattle in Bellevue, WA.

It looks like that family of birds, maybe a Ruby-crowned kinglet. But it looked like other regional birds as well. They're always flitting around the trees in my backyard so I'll watch for them and see if they have that ruby crown.

MaeZe said:

I live near Seattle in Bellevue, WA.

It looks like that family of birds, maybe a Ruby-crowned kinglet. But it looked like other regional birds as well. They're always flitting around the trees in my backyard so I'll watch for them and see if they have that ruby crown.

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If it wasn't a kinglet, sounds like it could be a bushtit - nondescript little grayish thing that flits around in groups. (Kinglets sometimes hang out with them.)

And, locally at least, I tend to see gold-crowned more than ruby-crowned kinglets.

It was very much like a bushtit, and the coloring is closer. And this is the behavior of the group:

Bushtits move quickly through vegetation, almost always in flocks, and continuously make soft chips and twitters. They forage much as chickadees do, frequently hanging upside down to grab small insects and spiders from leaves. Bushtits build a hanging nest out of soft materials such as grasses and spider webs.

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This is so adorable: Mama duck with 76 ducklings on Minnesota lake captured in stunning photos

Apparently Mergansers do this often.

Females sometimes lay their eggs in other ducks’ nests, including other Common Mergansers as well as Hooded Mergansers or Common Goldeneyes. The male usually abandons the nest during incubation, and the female cares for the ducklings on her own. She escorts them from the small streams and ponds near the nest site to larger lakes, rivers, and bays downstream.

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I can't get enough of this picture. Audubon - Here's Why This Mama Merganser Has More Than 50 Ducklings

While 50 is definitely on the high end, such big brood counts are actually pretty common, says Kenn Kaufman, field editor for Audubon. This is at least partly because ducks often lay their eggs in the nests of other ducks. In fact, Kaufman says a female duck will have a nest of her own and also make her way over to another nest or two to drop off a few eggs....

This behavior doesn’t completely explain Cizek’s photograph, though, because there is a limit to how many eggs one duck can successfully incubate. Female ducks lay about a dozen eggs and can incubate as many as 20, says Kaufman. More than that, and the birds can’t keep all the eggs warm.

The merganser in this picture probably picked up several dozen ducklings that got separated from their mothers. Adult ducks can’t tell which birds are theirs, and lost young birds that have already imprinted on their own mothers will instinctively start following another Common Merganser because she looks like mom.

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This is hilarious:

Since posting his picture online, Cizek says he’s been able to keep tracking the birds virtually, as other people in Bemidji, Minnesota, report seeing the giant brood make its way around town. This mother duck will tend to her ducklings for a couple more weeks, until the little birds are big enough to defend themselves.

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WARNING: These pics are probably quite big.

Hello! I have returned from Coober Pedy, the Oodnadatta Track and the Flinders Ranges. It was very, very dry, but I saw lots of birds -- including 15 lifers, among which was one of Oz's rarest bird species, the chestnut-breasted whiteface* -- but didn't take many bird photos. Here's a non-bird: a rare yellow-footed rock-wallaby having a rest in the Flinders Ranges.


*it has a chestnut breast and a white face

Beautiful.

Thank you! It is a remarkable part of the country. And -- a palaeontology squee here -- we got to see the 635 m.y.o. Ediacara fossils in situ. These are the oldest fossils of multicellular organisms.

I am so jealous. I've been fossil hunting in WA, OR, and AK. I absolutely love that kind of thing.

Is Coober Pedy Australian for Mars?

ElaineA said:

Is Coober Pedy Australian for Mars?

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One section of the gibber desert is called Moon Plain, but I think Mars Plain would be a better name.

Am just in Melbourne for a few days after visiting Broome in northern Western Australia.

Saw lots of rare birds. And last night, the dingoes were calling. Red desert sand and turquoise ocean: it's an amazing place.