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faerye

@faerye@pie.gd

Nebula-nominated speculative fiction writer.
Eclectic reader, piemaker, enthusiast of dinosaurs both extinct (🦖) and extant (:sapsucker:).
Plays and runs TTRPGs with and without dice.
Co-protagonist of @yaypie.
Befriend your local ecosystem!

Pronoun: she
Languages: en-5, fr-3+, cym-2, lat-2, it-1
Location: Atfalati Land, #pdx, #Oregon, USA

Header: me at age 5 with a half-life-sized papier-mâché stegosaur I helped make, looking resolute.

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faerye , to random
@faerye@pie.gd avatar

I am a big fan of the tweedy elegance of Gadwalls so I’ve always wanted to see their babies.

Well, I have justified my kneejerk identification of this large family as Gadwalls, so I have now seen Gadwall ducklings! They look…like mallard ducklings, only done in watercolor instead of as cartoons. Elegant right out of the egg?

A female gadwall leads her fleet of ten very new downy ducklings through the green water of a marshy lake. She is a slim elegant duck with orange-lined bill, subtly smoky eyestripe, and brown feathers that mostly look like a female mallard’s. There’s a jauntiness to her folded wingtips, however, and a patch of cinnamon on her side that mallards simply don’t have. Her babies look much like new downy mallards, but the soft yellow of their faces is lighter, and the brown eyestripe and cheek dot are thinner and less decided. They also have sweetly orange little bills, and less brown on top of their tiny soft heads. They are almost following her in pairs, but they are so new and in such a hurry that they are all crowded up almost on top of each other, and any strict organization in rows has falllen away in favor of keeping up with Mum!
ALT
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    • + loren
    faerye , to random
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    I’ve been visiting my family in Central OR so much, I hadn’t been to my favorite marsh near home in MONTHS! So I stopped by briefly today to see what’s going on.

    Mallard duckling broods of at least 3 different ages! Killdeer taking a bath. A female red-winged blackbird so mad at a great egret near her (presumed) nest that she rode it around in between divebombings! Great blue herons flying from bank to bank in inscrutable chords. Swallows stuffing their tiny faces!

    A killdeer sitting in water it has agitated in spreading rings, feathers all fluffed up. Its usually sleek head is riffled so its very large orange-eyelinered eye looks more proportional. A drop of water is just visible on its downturned black bill. All the latte-colored feathers of its head and back are bristling with texture, and its wings are held slightly askew, showing hints of the light pumpkin shade hidden in its tailfeathers. It looks sort of dyspeptic, but they always do to anthropomorphizers, because of the exaggerated cartoon sad-brows their facial stripes somehow create.
    A barn swallow perched among dead licheny branches, seen past several of them that cross in foreground. Its little beak is seen in profile, wide open to make noises much larger than the bird itself. The contrast between the deep blue feathers on the back of its head and body and the sweet-potato shades of its face and paler belly just makes the bird seem louder!

    A mallard female swimming through weedy lake water with a surprisingly young brood of ducklings behind her. The seven younguns (one hidden) look soft as thistledown, with golden-feathered faces marked with brown stripes and whorls. They look only a few days old, still bright and soft and little balls of energy. She soars in front of them, dark brown and tan like a 70s corduroy coat, looking very regal and smug, and extremely large in comparison. Something about the way they are bunched in her wake indicates the little ones have been hurrying and falling over each other to keep up.
    ALT
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    • + loren
    faerye , to random
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    Me: Remember, Mom, we do not search for Western Meadowlarks. We are genuinely here for whatever birds we see. Hearing the fae bird’s songs will NOT sway us into following, searching, yearning, etc.

    Mom, obviously yearning: Of course!

    Western Meadowlarks, invisible, sing beautifully.

    Mom, searching obviously: I think you-know-who is right over there!

    Me, sanctimoniously: I am grateful just to hear them.

    Mom continues searching but not saying the name. An hour or so passes.

    1/2

    faerye OP ,
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    Mom, tired: Ugh, let’s give up and go home for lunch.

    We trudge.

    Me, pointing: MOM MOM MOM

    Western Meadowlark, flying and perching far off: Greetings!
    Western Meadowlark, slightly closer: You were patient!
    Western Meadowlark: I am sufficiently amused! Behold!

    We danced.

    2/2

    A Western meadowlark, at the top of a wind-gnarled tree but nicely near for a zoom! It faces away but turns its head so we may admire its profile. Its long beak holds a dead caterpillar and another insect. Bright cadmium yellow flirts from its stripey shaded belly and splashes on its throat and forehead. It does not look at all invisible! A large eye and strongly drawn eye stripe make it very striking. Its striped and scaled brown wings are folded but held slightly tense, and its long legs are ready to launch it the moment it decides our audience is over.
    ALT
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    • + loren
    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!
    ALT
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    • faerye OP ,
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    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!
    ALT
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    • + loren
    faerye , to random
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    Apparently Oregon farms are growing fewer strawberries because California is elbowing them out of the processed market now (our lovely, very sweet berries don’t ship as well) so I, for one, am doing my part by eating many farm-stand strawberries! 🫡🍓

    https://www.opb.org/article/2024/05/28/oregon-farmers-strawberry-season-production-growth/

    Sliced strawberries in a small glass bowl on a counter. The strawberries are deep, ripe red: vivid red all the way through; red like the lipstick color you can never find; red the way blood must look to vampires; sapsucker head red; the red of a rose cut for romance; juicy red, strawberry-red through every millimeter without an iota of compromise.
    ALT
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    • NanoBookReview ,
    @NanoBookReview@zirk.us avatar

    @faerye Good Lord those bad boys are RED.

    faerye OP ,
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    @NanoBookReview INDEED. They are not fooling around!

    faerye , to random
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    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.
    ALT
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    • + loren
    faerye , to random
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    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.

    A sapsucker clinging to the thick, striated trunk of an aspen tree and looking a little curious as if listening with cocked head. It’s a hybrid of the red-naped and red-breasted sapsucker. Above a yellowed set of tweedy breastfeathers, it has a black collar and deep scarlet head, with some black and white eye stripes.
    ALT
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    • + loren
    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.
    ALT
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    • + loren
    faerye , to random
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    Me: “Now, Felicity, you haven’t got all your bird photos processed and added to eBird reports from your LAST trip to Central Oregon. You need to take photos judiciously, mindfully, parsimoniously.”

    Woodpeckers: exist

    Me: frenzy of shutter noises

    rodbotic , (edited )
    @rodbotic@kind.social avatar

    @faerye each day Street going out, we have been playing the game 'guess today's shutter count!'.

    We both shoot, yesterday my wife thought she only took 85, and i thought 400. She had 482, and i had taken 594.
    How could we not.
    5 owl day!
    New baby owl,
    pileated woodpecker feeding at the nest,
    and a Heron failing to eat a Muskrat.

    It was a great birding day!

    faerye OP ,
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    @rodbotic That sounds like a FABULOUS day! Definitely worth it :) Mine was only 355 as I recall, but it was just an evening birding trip after driving here.

    faerye , to random
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    In Bend for just over an hour before having this moment of utter bewildered depletion where I’m tearing myself away from a sapsucker to watch a woodpecker, which flies higher in the tree and spooks a sapsucker. Total overload! And that was BEFORE the Hairy mama feeding her babies, or the many Lewis’s!!!! :sapsucker: 🤩❤️🖤🤍 :sapsucker:

    loren ,
    @loren@flipping.rocks avatar

    @faerye such woodpecker abundance! congrats on all the new friends!

    faerye , to random
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    Today I checked out a heron rookery nearby! My conservative count (already possibly incremented by my photos) was 15 herons, probably all fledglings — NO verified responsible adults.

    I mean, would you not trust these faces to take care of themselves?

    Three juvenile great blue herons in a conifer tree. Two are sitting on a twig nest and the other, on a branch on the other side of the trunk, is holding its wings very wide as if saying ‘not them, look at ME!’ All have ridiculous dark blue soft feather crests, like the hairstyle on Beaker from the Muppets. The two whose eyes we clearly see have bright yellow, very dinosaurian eyes. Their beaks, top mandible blue instead of yellow, look sort of dusty and doughy, as if formed but not yet finished. Their necks are streaky mauve, white and blue, which makes them look even messier. The attention-seeking one has his neck at full extension, which looks ridiculous.
    ALT
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    • + loren
    loren ,
    @loren@flipping.rocks avatar

    @faerye i trust them with my finances

    faerye OP ,
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    @loren They can have friends over!

    A photo showing the bottom of the previous nest, the two homebody fledglings still sitting in it but half-seen. The attention-getter heron now has his head and neck feathers fluffed but his neck fully contracted into a deep S-curve, doing a classic heron pose. Maybe this is how they look cool? Anyway, the neighbor kid from the next nest down is visible on the lower right, doing the same poofed-feather S-curve pose right back.
    ALT
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    • + loren
    faerye , to random
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    So last Friday when I went on , I spotted a bushtit nest! I didn’t know that bushtits made hanging pouches, but I was sure if I was patient, I would get a look at whatever wee bird engineers were messing with it! Sure enough, I did: the female bushtit is still seen through branches, like the nest, but the male did some poses for me 😊

    The male bushtit in profile, looking more pensive. In profile you can see the narrow, slightly curved shape of the small insect-grabbing bill, and more of the shape of the bird. There’s still no neck — it’s a very orbicular little bird — but it does have a proportionally quite long tail which adds to its character and charm!
    Seen through the branches and leaves of the bush, a long hanging-pouch style nest. It looks to be made primarily out of moss, and if I did not swear to you I saw birds interacting with it, you might think it was made for a faerie terrarium by a rather twee Etsy seller! It’s pendulous and larger at the bottom, like a knit Christmas stocking with a chocolate orange in it.
    The female bushtit, glimpsed in heroic profile and somewhat obscured by twigs. Her pale eye is trained on the future, out there…bushtit chicks…bushtit domination! Her tiny sharp bill is upraised in firm determination. If anything, she is even more spherical than her mate, having puffed up her soft mouse-colored feathers quite prodigiously.

    A male American bushtit with his face turned directly toward the camera. It’s a tiny bird of a soft dust-mote taupe color and no discernible neck. It’s clinging onto a thorny bush with its capable big black claws, and its tiny face looks alert. Its soft chest and belly are turned toward us and look touchably fluffy!
    ALT
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    • + loren
    faerye , to random
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    Looking at last Friday’s bird photos, and I’d love an external opinion. I managed to take a few photos of these elusive little ~sparrow-sized jobbers we kept seeing in the underbrush of a scrubwood margin on Sauvie Island. The only good match I’ve found for them is female or immature Lazuli Buntings, which would be a lifer for me. Anyone with more experience have an opinion?

    (Sauvie Island, Columbia River, NW , May 24)

    The right bird has stuck its head curiously out beyond its intrepidly grasped plant stem, while the left bird is more fully hidden. The head is a dusty taupe, with a slight white stripe through the upper part of the dark eye, and a medium-shade line continuing from the eye toward the back of the head. The beak is grey. Under the beak, two fairly distinct white jowl-stripes. Of such doctor’s-office drab markings are potential lifer identifications made!

    Two small birds clinging to the green stalks of weeds or grasses. Their body plan is similar to a sparrow’s, but their beaks have more of a finch’s broadness at the base. Their legs seem to be gray, and all their plumage has a soft, pastel, 90s designer-color feel. The belly is white, which gives way to pale beige nearer the wing. The upper breast is an anemic orange. The left one is showing the underside of its tail: dingy shite coverts and a medium gray tail. The folded wings are also medium gray, with two white wingbars, fairly distinct.
    ALT
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    • + loren
    faerye OP ,
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    @loren Ooh, congrats!

    loren ,
    @loren@flipping.rocks avatar

    @faerye thank you! and to you too on what i am pretty sure is your lifer as well! haha

    faerye , to random
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    Yesterday I was helping a friend in his garden, and saw quite a few ladybugs. We’re told the Asian Lady is outcompeting local varieties, but I saw almost as many Western Polished Lady Beetles as ALBs. (The ALBs however were obviously engaged in furthering their success in : Content Note for beetle sex!)

    Asian lady beetles stacked on each other in a presumed mating. They are on the leaf of what I believe is a stinging nettle. Both have many small black spots on their ripe-tomato red wing-cases, and we get a good look at the little antennaed head each has tucked neatly below the broad shield of the pronotum.

    faerye , to random
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    Me: I am an adult. I am a serious birder. I won a spelling competition once. The word is ‘pelican’!

    American White Pelican: exists

    Me: PELINGCAN!!!!

    (Yesterday)

    An American White Pelican in flight, seen in profile. It’s in full breeding plumage, so its long bill is bright yellow with a weird half-circle ‘plate’ sticking up from the top bill three quarters of the way to the tip. Very odd-looking! Their body is pure eye-catching white with dark black wingtips. This one is caught near the top of the flap, so the black wingtips are prominently displayed against the bright shimmer of the inlet beyond, every feather held slightly apart like that of a vulture. It is skimming along close to the water, with a meadow in foreground. Behind it, an incised yard-deep bank shows different sediment layers and a green mess of brambles and grass rises up the mainland beyond.
    ALT
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    • + loren
    parsingphase ,
    @parsingphase@m.phase.org avatar

    @faerye There are no serious adults where birb are involved.

    faerye , to random
    @faerye@pie.gd avatar

    Still processing photos, but got some decent shots of my first non-fleeting Bullock’s Orioles! She was particularly keen on getting her portrait taken and sat for quite some time. 🧡🖤


    A male oriole in the crook of another lichen-covered oak branch. His gold is more the deep juicy orange of a ripe mango, and he sports a black cap connected to his eyestripe, and a splash of white accenting his black wing. Despite the bold color scheme, he is shyer of my camera and is only visible from midwing up. His bill is also in very sharp profile.

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