The Clay-colored Thrush is the American Robin of Central America: widely distributed, common to abundant across its range and adapted to areas of human disturbance. It’s a bit drab, even for a thrush, with a brown back and a paler brown chest and belly – clay-colored, yellowish bill and grayish to pinkish legs. Even if…
We’re talking about camera noise here, and specifically digital camera noise. A reader recently asked what “color noise” is and why it was objectionable in photos. “Noise” – and there are various types of noise that can afflict a digital camera – is random data you don’t want in your photos. There are different things…
This handsome fellow was enjoying a nice lunch as WC drove up. The bird is backlit, and wearing jewelry, but it’s still a treat to get a tight shot on an Osprey with a fish. Or at least what’s left of a fish; the bird’s bulging crop shows you where the rest of the fish…
It’s not much of a photo. Not only is the bird obviously on a feeding station; it was taken with WC’s first digital single lens reflex camera, an Olympus E-1, using a low quality 50-200mm zoom lens with an even lower quality 1.4 teleconverter. To get the shutter speed up to a still too slow…
Sure, any number of bad things seem to come out of Texas: Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, piss-poor utility planning, George Bush, Louie Gohmert, Alex Jones, pawn shop chain stores, oil spills; it’s a very, very long list, and WC doesn’t want to trigger anyone by attempting to set it all out. Least of all himself.…
WC dragged his visiting brother on June 8 to an all-day trip to Camas Prairie and Centennial Marsh. To his surprise and WC’s, we had a lot of fun. Here are a few photos and notes from the trip. Camas Lilies don’t appear in any numbers every year; it takes a little extra water. This…
“Raptors” is the imprecise word that WC uses for falcons, hawks, eagles and buzzards. East Asia – or at least Thailand – seems to have a much greater variety of raptors than the New World. Here’s a selection of seven or so that WC photographed in Thailand this year and some brief notes on each.…
This is another of the Nightingale-Thrushes of Central and South America. This species is found from Central Mexico to Costa Rica and the western edge of Panama. It’s found mostly in the cloud forest and adjacent disturbed area where it forages on the ground and in the understory for insects, seeds and berries. It’s found…
The Great Egret lives and breeds on all of the continents save Antarctica. It’s by no means the largest heron, but it’s arguably the most widely distributed. And its recovery from near-extirpation in North America is an example of how bird populations can be saved from human folly. WC has been lucky enough to see…
There are some 59 species of Hornbills, spread across 14 genera, all found exclusively in the Old World, from the East Indies to West Africa. What the family Bucerotidae have in common is an extravagant bill, often capped with a horn structure called a casque. Mind you, not as extravagant as the New World’s Toucans,…
A close cousin to last week’s Black-headed Nightingale-Thrush, this is another of the eight Catharus Nightingale-Thrushes. The species has the smallest range of that genus, extending across the highlands of central Costa Rica and into the mountains of western Panama. Within that range it is confined to the higher slopes, from about 1,800 meters up…
This post is for WC’s friend, Nils Warnock, a consummate birder. He has forgotten more about birds and birding than WC will ever learn. He has carte blanc to correct all of WC’s errors. To misquote Calvin and Hobbs, there are about a bazillion flycatchers. Among the Tyrannidae, the New World’s Tyrant Flycatchers alone, there…
Obviously to even the newest reader, one of WC’s passions is to photograph birds. While you can never have too many photos of the local birds,1 for WC it’s especially fun to photograph new species. This spring, thanks to the tireless efforts of Mrs. WC, we have had a series of amazing birding trips: Thailand,…
The Black-headed Nightingale-Thrush is a fairly common, American Robin-sized thrush found in Central America. Birds of the World says that it is found in “Dense dark undergrowth of primary humid evergreen forest (cloudforest).” That’s completely consistent with WC’s experience with the species. When you combine that behavior with the low light performance of Olympus cameras…
Anyone who has followed Wickersham’s Conscience for more than a few weeks knows that two of WC’s interests are geology and birds. Those two areas aren’t as unrelated as they might seem; often, geology and geomorphology dictate what birds are where. WC has already written about High Island, where the geologic accident of a salt…
The systematics of Northern and Tropical Parulas, small, brightly colored wood-warblers, have a long, twisted history. Presently, ornithologists treat the two Parulas as a part of the genus Setophaga, along with some 32 other species. Formerly, they had a genus of their own. The Northern Parula breeds across the eastern United States, as far north…
A reader recently asked WC what was the biggest bird WC has photographed. The question is imprecise, because there is more than one way to define the “biggest bird.” If that reader means “the heaviest bird,” then it is the Greater Rhea. Weighing in at as much as 27 kilograms, it’s not even close; the…
Plovers are a group of about 68 species across nine genera, all in the family Charadiidae. They are found on every continent but Antarctica, and they get pretty close there. The systematics are far from fully sorted out, and the life histories of most of those 68 species are pretty much unknown. Ornithologists cannot even…
The Austral Thrush is the southernmost member of the 83 (!) members of the genus Turdus. It’s found on the southern tip of South America, north along the western side as far central Chile, and in the Falkland Islands. In the Falklands, it is sedentary; on the South American mainland, there is some irregular migration…
North America is graced with four species of Tanager: Scarlet, Summer, Western and Hepatic. Exceptionally colorful, beautiful and relatively common, they are long-distance migrants that grace our spring and summer days. But, alas, they aren’t really Tanagers; they aren’t members of the family Thraupidae, the true tanagers. Rather, they are members of the family Cardinalidae,…
Certainly the most difficult North American family of birds to see, let alone photograph, are the Rails. While there are some 139 species of Ralidae worldwide, WC in this post focuses on the six “true” North American Rails.1 WC has photos of five of them – for a given definition of “photo” – and is…
WC has exhausted his collection of even marginally presentable photos of Trogons, so we will move on to another family of birds, the Thrushes, the taxonomic family Turdidae. There are some 174 species of Thrushes spread across 18 genera. Some will be immediately familiar. Some will surprise you. WC has photographed only a small fraction…
A reader commented recently in response to an older blog post, “Flycatchers are boring.” WC acknowledges that a lot of North American flycatchers are small, gray and difficult to identify. That doesn’t make them boring for WC; just a little challenging. But WC takes the point to be that the reader thinks all flycatchers are…
A supremely lovely bird; the most beautiful, all things considered, that I have ever seen. He owes his beauty to the intensity and arresting contrast of his coloration, the resplendent sheen and glitter of his plumage, the elegance of his ornamentation, the symmetry of his form, and the noble dignity of his carriage. Alexander Skutch,…
Vireos, a family of songbirds distributed around the world, might be one of the families of birds least familiar to non-birders. Vireos don’t make it to Alaska; WC only had limited experience with this family of birds from trips to warmer climes before moving to Idaho. They aren’t as flashy as their warbler cousins, but…
WC was recently in Texas.1 The occasion was spring migration and, in this case, the migration is extraordinary. Small songbirds – in the case of the Warblers that are the focus of this post, weighing about a third of an ounce – fly non-stop from South America to the Gulf Coast, a distance of some…
Quetzals, some the most beautiful birds in the world, are also members of the Trogonidae, the Trogon family. While the most famous Quetzal is the Resplendent Quetzal – next week’s bird – there are five other species, including this close cousin, the Golden-headed Quetzal. The name is misleading; the bronzish coloration of the male’s head…
Yesterday it was Mountain Bluebirds. Today it’s another blue bird. After an Indigo Bunting has flown 600 miles nonstop across the Gulf of Mexico, a bath in Dave’s Drip at Sabine Woods on the eastern Texas coast is pretty appealing. Of course, other bird species have the same idea, so you have to wait for…
It’s spring migration, WC’s favoritest time of the year. So WC is off chasing birds, and may have sketchy internet service as well as little time to write blog posts. In the event there are gaps in in the blog post stream the next week or two, here are some Mountain Bluebird photos taken this…
WC suspects some readers are getting tired of birds. So today WC will switch to mammals. Specifically flying mammals: Mexican Free-tailed Bats. The cave itself is an unprepossessing hole in the ground, about 20 feet wide and perhaps six feet tall. It’s home to 10-12 million Mexican Free-tailed Bats, as well as a colony of…
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