A final thrush before we move on to a different family of birds, and WC has saved one of the best for last. The state bird of Idaho – it’s available as an alternate license plate – as well as Nevada, the Mountain Bluebird’s electric blue coloration is always a delight. Which is probably why…
This post continues the new semi-regular series, Most Memorable Moments, featuring some of the most memorable natural history experiences that WC has been lucky enough to enjoy. Sometimes nature can be magical and memorable, and, yes, it’s still magical even when you know how and why it works. Links to prior Most Memorable Moments are…
The second member of the genus Sialia is the Western Bluebird, a very handsome species that ranges in a patchy distribution from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, but not in much of the Great Basin. Like its cousin bluebird species, it is a cavity nester, and has suffered from loss of useable cavities to…
WC is more or less chained to his Polar Care Cube, a nifty little machine that circulates ice cold water through a pad on his swollen right knee. Bird photography is presently a goal, not a possibility. So WC is revisiting earlier birding trips. This one was in 2014. Rio Pixiam is one of the…
Yep, bluebirds are thrushes, members of the genus Sialia, and especially handsome thrushes, in WC’s opinion. The three North American bluebirds – Eastern, Western and Mountain – constitute all of the members of that genus, and we’ll have a look, albeit with sketchy photos in two cases, at each of those three species. The Eastern…
Some Most Memorable Moments last three days. And it should have been four. In this two part post, WC describes his 1995 visit to the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary. WC has reported on parts of the trip before, and a few of the photos have appeared earlier, but many photos are new and this…
This post was written pre-surgery.) This is a different genus of thrushes than the birds WC has described earlier; these are Myadestes, the solitaires. There are eight species of Solitaire and nine Hawaiian variations (at least one of them likely etinct. Confusingly, there are three other bird species called “Solitaires” in two other genera. Trying…
Among Americans, at least, the most familiar thrush is the American Robin. It’s the largest, most abundant and broadly distributed thrush in North America. The very wide presence of this songster in its backyard setting, together with its loud, musical voice, make it one of the most recognizable birds in North America. The American Robin…
WC spent a few hours on a late summer trip to Camas Prairie/Centennial Marsh east of Boise earlier this week. The recent thunderstorms had brought a little bit of green to what is usually a pretty parched landscape this time of year, and the birding was good. Of course, there were the usual challenges sorting…
In response to WC’s earlier post on Humpback Whales, a reader asked, “What’s the biggest whale you’ve photographed.?” The would be Balaenoptera musculus, the Blue Whale, the biggest animal known to have lived on our planet. In the North Atlantic and North Pacific, blue whales can grow up to about 90 feet and weigh over…
The Wood Thrush is yet another spot-breasted, brown-backed thrush. The spots are bigger and extend further down the belly than other North American thrushes, but what really separates the Wood Thrush from its cousins is its song. Henry David Thoreau said, The song has an ethereal quality that sets the thrush apart from all others……
This post continues a new semi-regular series, Most Memorable Moments, featuring some of the most memorable natural history experiences that WC has been lucky enough to enjoy. Sometimes nature can be magical and memorable, and, yes, it’s still magical even when you know how and why it works. Links to prior Most Memorable Moments are…
WC isn’t talking about Willis Alan Ramsey’s odious song, although WC will really have to do a blog post about Ramsey some day, and his (in)famous second album. “Muskrat Love,” originally “Muskrat Candlelight,” was covered by a lot of folks but made a hit by The Captain and Tensile back in 1976. Ars non disputanden…
WC doesn’t have very good photos of Veery, another of the Catharus thrushes. In fact, WC has only seen the species three times: twice on High Island, Texas, immediately after the birds had flown non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico, and once, at considerable distance, in the community of Sea-Tac, Washington. And WC has never…
WC has praised Randall Munroe‘s excellent XKCD web comic before. But just for giggles, let’s parse a random cartoon and see why WC has such a high opinion of Munroe’s work. (Spoiler Alert: It’s not his artwork.) Here’s his 2650th cartoon, which went up a couple of weeks ago. If you mouse over the original…
Another spot-breasted thrush, the Hermit Thrush has WC’s very favorite summer song of all the Alaska passerines. Andrew Spencer recorded this lovely song on Kodiak Island: Mrs. WC used to wake WC up in the middle of the night to listen to the first of the year Hermit Thrush song in our yard. It was…
South Georgia Island is a surviving fragment from the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent. Located in the far South Atlantic Ocean, at latitude 54° South, about 1,200 miles east of the tip of South America, it’s a long ways from anywhere, but it’s absolutely worth the effort and expense of getting there. The western side…
“Megaptera” is Latin for “big-winged” and “novaeangliae” means “New England.” The name is nearly nonsensical. Whales don’t have “wings,” although these do have the largest pectoral fins of all cetaceans, and while they may or may not have first been seen in New England, in fact the species’ fourteen diverse population segments (“DPS”) are scattered around…
It’s been weeks without a geology post. How did that happen? Some background. WC, semi-immobilized by a bad knee and huddled by his air-conditioning vent to escape the current heat wave, has been sorting through slides from the days before digital photography. A recent batch of scanned slides from WC’s 2002 trip to the Galápagos…
This is another Catharus thrush, wintering in South America and breeding in the taiga and low Arctic shrub thickets from Newfoundland to the Seward Peninsula in Alaska. It has an unusual migration route; all the birds, even those breeding in far western Alaska and eastern Siberia, move through the eastern half of the Lower 48.…
All of the Southern Ocean’s South Georgia Island is spectacular, but Gold Harbor, near the southeastern end of the 106-mile long sub-Antarctic Island is a stunner. With the hanging icefall of Bertrab Glacier looming over the long arc of the gravel-shored bay, Gold Harbor teems with wildlife. Southern Fur Seals, like those in the foreground…
Getting there was just a little . . . hairy. We flew in a small, twin engine commercial aircraft, refueling in Deadhorse, Alaska before flying east on the arctic coast to the Iñupiaq village of Kaktovik. There was pretty dense ground fog at Kaktovik, and it took three passes to find the end of the…
From late spring to mid-summer across much of mainland Alaska, into the late twilight, you can listen to the upward-spiraling song of the Swainson’s Thrush, another haunting melody of the boreal forest. Other birds may sleep at night, or at least go silent; not the Swainson’s Thrush, which sings, seemingly, all night. Unlike most of…
WARNING: Serious technogeekery ahead. Readers may recall WC is attempting to inventory the number of bird species he has photographed. Progress has been slow but steady. Some background: WC has been forced to abandon the software used to manage bird photos since 2005. That software, a product called Aperture from Apple, was “EOLed” – “End…
WC has exhausted his even marginally decent photos of Central American and South American thrushes. Let’s have a look now at the North American thrushes, starting with the Varied Thrush. The Varied Thrush is very much a bird of the west, and mostly a bird of the northern Boreal forests. Its beautiful, haunting song, a…
Because they are so common, WC thinks that Killdeer are under-appreciated. A handsome member of the plover genus Charadius, the Latin root that gives us “charade,” they are an adaptable, ubiquitous, noisy and even entertaining bird species. The species name is vociferus, another Latin root meaning “clamorous or noisy.” Sometimes around the clock. The “charade”…
As noted earlier, WC spent the 4th of July holiday in the mountains of Central Idaho, at a campground off of the South Fork of the Payette River. The Ponderosa Pines there aren’t especially birdy, and WC’s limited mobility made finding birds a bit more challenging, but there were a few birds to be found…
This post continues a new semi-regular series, Most Memorable Moments, featuring some of the most memorable natural history experiences that WC has been lucky enough to enjoy. Sometimes nature can be magical and memorable, and, yes, it’s still magical even when you know how and why it works. Links to prior Most Memorable Moments are…
Sometimes in WC’s process of labelling bird photos, determining the species, mistakes get made. In a typical day in Central or South America, WC might take as many as 3,000 photos. Each evening, no matter how tired WC’s group of birders might be, we make an effort to list the species seen that day. Even…
WC proudly flies the colors. Be safe. Enjoy your holiday.
Wickersham's Conscience 
You must be logged in to post a comment.