The White-shouldered Tanager is a close cousin to the White-lined Tanager featured here two weeks ago. It’s distinguished from its cousin by the much larger, white shoulder patches instead of the thin, sometimes invisible, white wing lines. The White-shouldered often shows a bit more purplish iridescence in its black than does the White-lined. Like the…
WC is again taking heat from readers for being avian-centric. WC could point out that birds are what he does. WC could plead that birds are the only taxonomic area in which he is even marginally competent. But instead, here’s a sampler of mammals, specifically a set of rodents, that have wandered in front of…
Back in early May, when the Bird of the Week shifted to Tanagers, WC warned that there were dozens of species. Here’s the fifteenth. This is a species WC has only seen one time; it’s a canopy dweller, spending most of its time in the upper canopy, a hundred feet or more over the heads…
WC was asked recently what was the biggest and the smallest bird he has photographed. The biggest is pretty easy: it’s the Greater Rhea, photographed in the Brazillian Pantanal. With a mass of as much as 20-25 kilograms (55 pounds) and a height of 1.7 meters (5 feet seven inches), nothing else comes close. It’s…
To some extent, the White-lined Tanager is an odd species. It is very widely distributed, ranging from Costa Rica to Argentina, and across the width of South America. There are isolated populations scattered in the Andes. Yet there are no subspecies. It is monotypic. It is strongly sexually dimorphic; the bright, rufous female looks unrelated…
WC is back from a week-long trip to the easterly side of the Oregon Cascades, where the scenery is very, very good but services do not include internet. This is the second of several posts from the trip. WC’s geomorphology professor, back at the University of Oregon, told us one time, “There’s some very interesting…
WC is back from a week-long trip to the easterly side of the Oregon Cascades, where the scenery is very, very good but services do not include internet. This is the first of several posts from the trip. Crater Lake, in the Oregon Cascades, is justly famous. That remnant of Mt. Mazama is a near-perfect…
