Here’s a final Puffbird to wrap up this family of birds. It may seem like WC has been writing about Puffbirds for months, but in reality WC has photographed only a tiny fraction of the 36 members of this family. So many birds; so little time. The Barred Puffbird has a pretty restricted range, from…
The Collared Puffbird is found in Amazonia, the Amazon River basin, including the lower eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains in Ecuador and Peru. WC was lucky enough to see and photograph – admittedly poorly – the species in Peru, where it is comparatively rare. In fact, eBird reports less than 300 sightings for Peru.…
Birds famously evolved from dinosaurs. Some birds haven’t evolved very far from their theropod ancestors. WC thinks a Great Blue Heron would fit right in to the late Cretaceous. WC got to spend some time with a Great Blue Heron in the newly refurbished Albertson Park in Boise, recently. Photos were taken. Skilled bird photographers…
Remember WC cautioned readers that some of the Puffbird photos were pretty sketchy. Here’s another. The White-eared Puffbird is found from eastern Peru and central Brazil south to Paraguay and northeastern Argentina. It prefers the middle levels of jungle forest and the gallery forests of the lowlands. Like other Puffbirds, it still-hunts from mid-level perches in trees and shrubs,…
In April 2013, when WC left Olympus behind and bought a Canon 1DX, the camera had already been on the market about two years. But it was still the best camera Canon was offering, and WC was completely satisfied with the product. But over the course of the seven years that followed, camera technology improved…
If there are puffbirds called “Monklets” you should have known there would be puffbirds called “Nunlets.” In fact, there is a whole genus of them, Nonnula, in which there are at least six species. The Gray-cheeked Nunlet is the only one of the six which WC has been able to photograph to date. It’s a pretty…
Unless you are a very serious computer geek, you’ve probably never heard of Russ Kirsch. But In 1951, while still in school, Kirsch joined the National Bureau of Standards as a member of the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC) team, which was in charge of handling the U.S.’s first programmable computer. In 1957, led the…
This post is inspired by WC’s good friend Ron Dudley, a bird photographer who is a couple of light years better than WC. Ron observed recently that we learn from our mistakes. Here’s a gallery of photos that WC rejected because, in one way or another, WC erred in executing the photo. Trust WC when…
WC has a few more photos of Puffbirds, but none of them are going to win any prizes for quality. Still, the birds are interesting enough that WC will share the mediocre documentation photos, with apologies for the sub-standard quality. Here’s a White-necked Puffbird, a species found from southern Mexico to Peru and much of…
Another of the puffbird species that WC has been able to photograph, this one in 2010. Panama is more or less in the middle of this species’ range, which extends from Mexico to Ecuador, generally in humid evergreen forests and shady forest edges, usually pretty low in the understory. This is an ambush predator. It…
It’s been a while since WC indulged in some really geeky geology. But WC was recently near a handsome outcropping, and couldn’t resist snapping a few photos and crawling around with his hand lens while trucks roared by five feet away on Idaho 55. Hey, it’s safer than COVID-19. In geology, a “complex” is “a…
Least Chipmunks are very cute. Watching a Least Chipmunk scratch an itch or three is way beyond cute. WC thought it might cheer us all up to share. There was the itch under the chin. With the back leg scratching on air, the chipmunk discovers an itchy spot in the hard-to-reach middle of his…
Another member of the Puffbird family, this is the Lanceolated Monklet, one of the rarest birds WC has photographed. “Lanceolated” means “spear-shaped,” a reference to the chest and flank streaking. “Monklet” is a play on the name of its cousins, the Nunbird, but the Monklet is pretty small, so instead of being a monk it’s…
As WC mentioned earlier, he spent part of last week at Mrs. WC’s family cabin on Payette Lake, in central Idaho. At 5,000-plus feet, it’s about 20 degrees cooler than Boise, and a completely different set of habitats for birds. WC spent a lot of time on the cabin’s front deck, photographing the Ponderosa Pine…
This past week, WC had a chance to take closeup photos of Red Crossbills, both juveniles and adults. This species of bird feeds almost exclusively on seeds of evergreens, extracting the seeds from the cones. From a Crossbill’s perspective, evergreen cones – pine, spruce, fir and larch, for example – are a kind of locked…
Here’s another member of the Puffbird family, and close cousin to last week’s White-fronted Nunbird, the Black-fronted Nunbird. At least in WC’s experience, this is a much more common species, and unlike its cousins, hangs out in the lower understory, making it a little easier to photograph. It’s also a little more active than its…
WC has been accused of being a speciesist, exalting birds above all other critters. That’s probably true, but WC scarcely cares. But in an effort to at least partially redress that emphasis, WC introduces an occasional feature, focused on marine mammals. We’ll begin with the cutest and smartest: the endangered Sea Otter. Sea Otters, not…
Old age brings perspective, WC was told. Well, WC has achieved old age, and what it has mostly brought is a sadness that so little has changed. WC will illustrate his point with some photos from another of his heroes, Margaret Bourke-White, a great photographer of the first half of the 20th Century. Here’s her…
There are whole families of birds that are only found in the Neotropics – Central and South America – that are almost unknown to all but hard core birders. One of those families of birds is the Bucconidae, the Puffbirds. They take their English name from their somewhat puffy appearance. It’s called “lax plumage” and gives…
WC went out comet chasing last Friday night. To escape the light pollution in the Boise metropolitan region, WC and Mrs. WC headed out onto the Snake River Plain, at the westerly end of the Morley Nelson Birds of Prey area, along Swan Falls Road. We found a bumpy, dusty side road, and settled in…
