faerye , to random
@faerye@pie.gd avatar

Trying to remember to post my photos when not out and about!

This is my great treasure from yesterday: I realized that sometimes the Hairy put its head out to meet the parent. Only once per feeding, and usually right when the parent landed, so my attempts took a lot of patience — from my mom as well as me!

I just love woodpeckers so much!

A mother Hairy Woodpecker perching at her nest hole in a large aspen trunk. Her baby (single as far as we can tell, sadly) has thrust its scraggly head out to meet her and get fed, and kindly left it out long enough for me to snap a picture! Judging by beak size — because the spiky feathers standing up are a little deceptive — the baby’s head is perhaps three quarters the size of its mother’s already! She is sleek in black and white feathers, with a big dark eye in a graceful slender head with a strong bill. The baby’s eye is wreathed in wrinkles of black skin, and its feathers, stripes of white and black and a startling tomato-colored mohawk, are sticking out, looking fluffy or crusty by turns. Mom, morsel given up, looks pensive with her head tilted. Baby looks eager and its bill is open for its near-continuous peeping!
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    • faerye OP ,
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    My mom has been back to visit the Hairy and his frazzled parents three times since I left. 6/12 and 6/14, the scamp was still demanding food. 6/15, our little beggar had flown!

    In honor of this, I’m posting a photo of the little one from last week. Photo is from 6/10, 2 days after the one I’m replying to, but you can see some differences in plumage already.

    Congratulations on fledging, little woodpecker! We love you.

    A baby Hairy Woodpecker sticking his head out of a big nest hole in a knot on an aspen trunk. He looks a little scrubby and wide-eyed, but no longer quite as obviously dinosaurian and unfinished. His size is similar to that in the previous photo (perhaps three quarters his mom’s size) but his feathers are smoother, and some colors have come in more fully in the plumage. His red Mohawk no longer has a clumpy, spiny look like fresh hair plugs, but lies down nicely. Juveniles of both sexes can have this red crown, but the extensiveness of his stripe makes him almost certainly male! The black in front of his eyes is tipped with white. And below the eye, where wrinkles of black, seemingly featherless skin were gathered before, the white stripe has enlarged and filled in to make a fine white mustache. Under his chin, also, the feathers have filled in nicely. He also never used to stick his head out except when his mom or dad was there! Getting bolder, little guy!
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    • + loren
    faerye , to random
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    It’s difficult to say which is harder:

    1. The multiple-open-references identification of the photos of yesterday’s Weird (but still substantially like every flycatcher) Flycatcher; 😰

    Or 2. the writing and submission of one’s eBird report justifying one’s daring choice to identify the flycatcher at all, let alone assert (with no audio evidence!) that it is a locally RARE Willow Flycatcher. 😬

    The flycatcher has (kindly) turned that big triangular beak toward the camera, giving us a head-on look at it. The bird’s big eyes look very odd seen to either side of its head this way, and the brash triangular bill is clearly quite broad at the base, above the white throat of the sturdy little tyrant! (I’m not judging it for terrorizing insects on the wing: that’s the family name, Tyrannidae!)

    A stocky flycatcher perched on a vertical snag branch against a bright blue desert sky. It has a pale underbelly, gray slightly fluffy head, and darker wings with white wing bars, like basically every flycatcher. This one, though, has a chunkier head in proportion to its body, and a tail that seems to have folded into a moderate rectangle, not the more acrobatic accessory some have. Its dark eye is set further back from its bill and has no eye ring to speak of; and most of all, that insect-killing bill, sharp with a tiny killing hook, is orange on the bottom and broad! Just pointy and prominent and not very much like every other flycatcher.
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    • + loren
    faerye , to random
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    I dunno, I really love this park, but do you think they could get some woodpeckers in? 🤣

    (These are just the picidae that I got photos of in the parking lot.)

    A male hairy woodpecker hanging onto the side of a pale aspen. We can’t see the nest hole at this angle, but he has a line of drool on his bill that I’m sure has to do with providing foods to the unseen (but heard) youngsters! He has a slightly dingy white breast and white-spotted black coat, with jaunty eye stripes and a tomato red blaze on the back of his head you can barely see here.
    The female hairy woodpecker at the same nest hole, seen in profile with a green caterpillar in her beak. Hairy woodpeckers have long bill that’s often compared to a nail or chisel, but this bird looks so slender, all her feathers lying down sleek to her gracile skeleton, that on her the long bill just accentuates the narrowness of her lines. Her black and white color scheme contribute, as if she’s been drawn with an ink pen. We see her tough knobby talons clinging to the rough wood of the edge of her nest hole. We don’t see the young, but we can imagine their insistence from a certain air of harried patience on the mother.
    A northern flicker on (you guessed it) an aspen trunk. It has a very thick pointed beak for loud hammering, a smooth set of feathers in gray and latte tones covered with wild black belly spots, and a bright red mustache, for it is a red-shafted northern flicker. The aspen trunk has large scars in its white surface, healed over but obviously raspy rough.

    faerye OP ,
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    Here are a couple of the dozen-ish Lewis’s Woodpeckers I saw once we got past the parking lot. 🤣

    A woodpecker climbing around on a big dead Ponderosa pine, mostly stripped of its bark. There’s a nest hole — this individual’s nest, apparently — a couple of feet away at the top of the photo. The light shows off the iridescent shadings in the Lewis’s dark green wings and back. Its forked tail, pressed against the pale dead wood for support, is the same shade. Its long, wide-toed foot is sticking far out to the side, so it has a broad stance. The head is sort of in profile, so we see a bit of the big eye and red face, but also the dark head with odd two-tone riffle of white at the nape and collar, as if it has a distinguished peppering of white hair.

    A Lewis’s woodpecker or ‘Christmas woodpecker’ as I wish the ornithologists would rename them, sitting on a big dead branch and posing in the golden-hour sun. It has a long sharp beak turned up, from which its weird woodpeckery tongue is slightly protruding! It has a velvety scarlet face and a big lambent eye that looks a little shocked. It has a dark green back and wings, and fancy pink breast feathers, a bit ruffled up. Behind it, cloudless blue desert sky.
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    • + loren
    faerye , to random
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    Birds looking sideways at the world: 💙🤍💙

    (Tree swallow, Deschutes National Forest, , May 10)

    A tree swallow perches on a broken stub of branch emerging from a much-decayed snag tree’s trunk. In the blazing midday sun of the high desert, its back feathers are a decadent iridescent marine blue that ancient craftsmen would have labored weeks to produce in pigment; its front, from cheekbone to undertail coverts, is spotless white. It tips its tiny, almost stylized face to the side to train its dark globe of an eye upon the world. It has a tiny insect-grabbing triangle of beak and a slash of dark bandit-mask across its eyes. Rampantly anthropomorphizing, it looks quizzical!
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    • + loren
    faerye , to random
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    I hear it is , so here are some house wrens from last Friday! They were singing up a storm all along the margins of the controlled burn area and lazy braided creek we were visiting in .

    A house wren grasping a slender branch on a dead tree and looking over its shoulder, perhaps checking who has been listening to its songs. It’s quiet right now, shadow on its face making its eye look very dark and thoughtful. We can see the subtle micro-striping very well on its downturned folded tail.
    This is the obligatory ‘singing its heart out’ wren picture! Even though a branch is in the way, I wanted to get one of the little dears in full cry: their slender long curved beak open wider, and the throat full of trills. This one has its tail slightly fanned as if in effort as it sings into the cloudless high-desert sky!

    A house wren singing on the end of a dead conifer branch, with the bright shades of pine forest blurrily seen behind. House wrens are unflashily patterned even for a wren: no eye stripe, no body stripes, just practical brown-on-brown ticking on each feather as if they’re wearing country tweeds. They have a brown eye and a classically long, curved wren beak. This one is singing its beautiful song with its beak just slightly open, tipping the notes out into the sun.
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    • + loren
    faerye , to random
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    Ugh, I love Lewis’s Woodpeckers so much. Their glossy night-green wing feathers! Their red and white checked waistcoats! Their velvety scarlet little faces! Arrgh!

    The same woodpecker is erupting, head and shoulders, from a nest hole lower down in the same snag. His bill is wide open and the sawdust he’s just thrown is caught blooming around him in midair.
    The very same woodpecker is perched on one of several long, winding barkless branches near the top of the sawn-off snag. His hopeful eye is fastened on another Lewis’s we only see in partial silhouette on the nearer branch. He is displaying, his head held high so the contrast of his chalk-white neck feathers with the rest of his plumage is strong; his wings are held in an artificial half-raised pose as if he’s Bela Lugosi about to sweep a cape over his face. The other woodpecker is barely looking.
    A different, luckier woodpecker is pictured in mid flight, directly above the photographer. Their forked tail is crisp and dark against the blazing high desert sky, and the sun flares on the bright red of their head. The profile of their beak is not so distinct and well-drawn, however, because it is crammed full of one or more bulky arthropods. A good catch for this aerial insect-hunter!

    A woodpecker perched at the top edge of a sawn-off snag tree, his long-taloned claws gripping the flat surface in a broad stance. Late afternoon sun is lighting up his robust bill, his scarlet face, and the edge we see of his soft pinky belly feathers beyond his glossy folded wing. His forked tail presses the barkless tree, which has stood dead in the high desert sun and wind so long it’s bleached like driftwood. Our woodpecker looks up and almost over his shoulder with a big, alert eye, as if daydreaming.
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    • + rodbotic, loren
    faerye , to random
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    Mom insisted I take a bunch of photos of this Little Brown Jobber by the Deschutes River this evening, while I was uncharacteristically blasé and said, “are we sure it’s too small to be a female red-winged blackbird?”

    The prancing little chap proved to be a Savannah Sparrow, which I should have recognized but which is a lifer for Mom! And unusual for the location! She earned this one! 🤗

    The little bird perching among dead grass looking thoughtfully away from us, too serious to pose for pictures. Even more complexities of brown stripes are visible on its head and back, like the brown-on-brown styling of a 70s van that thought it was very groovy.
    The bird shows us its back: the long shirting-stripes of its little cape-collar of covert feathers, the tidy dark tips of its folded wings. It looks back coyly over its shoulder as if aware it looks strikingly like one of its identification pictures in eBird’s ID app!

    A small bird perched on an interesting blue-gray lava rock. It is quite spherical, with a little useful sparrow-beak glowing in the sunlight. Its main marking is a huge number of brown streaks, which seen nearly head-on make a sort of wild starburst. Its head is turned just enough to expose a flash of pollen-yellow eyeshadow above its beady eye.
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    • + loren
    faerye , to random
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    The monkey’s-paw of the really good view of a silent . So now I can try to figure out which species it is! But now…I have to try to figure out which species it is. 🤦🏻‍♀️

    A small flycatcher perched in a barely budding deciduous tree. Like other flycatchers, it is a soft grey creature with a sharp little insect-grabbing beak, a large eye with a distinct eye ring, a pale underbelly, and dark wings showing white wing bars when folded. It has no visible ‘peak’ in the feathers of its head, like a Dusky. However, its wingtips seem a little long, like a Hammond’s. And is that a pale band across the forehead, like a Gray Flycatcher?! I think it’s a Dusky! But how can I ever be sure?!
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    • + loren
    faerye , to random
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    American Kestrel! At the almost deserted state park 😍

    faerye OP ,
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    This is actually the third kestrel in two days, and I got a good long look at all of them! I feel extremely lucky. (Unlike the probable voles and newt in some of my other photos. 😬)

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